This is my backup drive and I don’t want to take a chance on it getting corrupted. I just wish there were release notes available so I would know if the upgrade fixes FireWire issues. But I guess it’s broke, so it needs fixing. I’ve always had the mindset that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” when it comes to firmware upgrades. I saw that there may be a firmware upgrade for the drive. So plugging the My Book directly to the iMac doesn’t work, but daisy-chaining through this other drive does. To my surprise, it worked and the drive mounted. On a hunch, I tried daisy-chaining the My Book through the old FireWire drive. I actually have another older FireWire drive (not a My Book) that I am replacing so I reconnected it in order to test the cables and iMac’s FireWire port. Thinking that there might be something wrong with the drive’s FireWire interface, I plugged it into an old Mac Mini running Leopard instead of Snow Leopard. Searching the web, I found that other people have FireWire issues and that there are many things I could try, e.g., turn the cable around, try a different cable, sacrifice a chicken, reset SMC. Swapped back to top and got “Unknown Device”. Instead of the warning, it simply said “Unknown Device”. I then tried the top port and checked System Profiler. This was with the cable plugged into the My Book’s bottom port.
I saw in the system Console, that the FireWire bus was unstable, and lots of resets.
Checking the FireWire bus with System Profiler I get a warning about it being unable to list FireWire devices.
If I connect just the FireWire My Book (i.e., no new USB My Book yet) to the iMac, the drive does not mount nor does it show up in Disk Utilities. Because I am running out of USB ports, I thought I would switch the older My Book to FireWire. I would now like to add a second newer My Book, one that only supports USB. The drive supports both USB and FireWire but has always been connected via USB.
I have a My Book Home Edition that I have been using on my Snow Leopard iMac for quite some time.
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