I picked up 2 200gb drives and have put them in external FW enclosures because the ATA-4 bus in my PowerMac1 won’t support drives larger than 128gb. I can successfully connect either drive to either FireWire port and they mount up perfectly. I can then read and write to them without any problem.
However, when I connect them both2, neither one is recognized. If I boot with both drives connected3 the PowerMac will stall during the boot process at ‘Waiting for local disks’. I’ve already fsck -y’d and run Disk Utility on both disks to repair any problems.
Any ideas?
UPDATE: I can connect one of the 200gb FW drives and my iPod to the PowerMac with them both connected to different FW ports but I can’t connect the iPod when it is chained to one of the 200gb drives. I can connect the FW drive and iPod in a chained configuration to my PowerBook, but I can’t connect both FW drives in a chained configuration. Perhaps I’ve got a problem with my drive enclosures.
UPDATE #2: Since I can’t chain the FW HDs on my PowerBook either, I’m thinking the culprit is probably the FW enclosures. I’m going to order some new FireWire enclosures and try again when they show up. Please continue posting potential solutions if you have any ideas.
UPDATE #3: If I connect one drive via USB and one drive via FireWire, they both mount as expected. Unfortunately this doesn’t help much since my PowerMac doesn’t have a USB 2 port.
- It’s an old dual 500hmz G4, I think it is the gigabit ethernet model. [up]
- Either individually to each FireWire port on the PowerMac or chained together connected to one port. [up]
- Again, chained or individually connected. [up]
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Peter adds this Comment:
How are the drive jumpers set? If they are both master or both slave, then I can see how you might have problems…
December 5th, 2004 at 2:37 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
The are both master, per the instructions included with the FireWire case.
December 5th, 2004 at 2:39 pm
Peter adds this Comment:
Can you try setting them to cable select, or set one to master and the other to slave? You know, just to spite the instruction manuals.
December 5th, 2004 at 2:43 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
I put them both on “cable select”, and I have the exact same behavior (testing on the PowerBook). Either will mount perfectly but when I chain them, they basically cause the system to freeze.
December 5th, 2004 at 3:02 pm
Peter adds this Comment:
Just curious, what make/model were the drives and drive enclosures?
December 5th, 2004 at 4:40 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
The drives are 200GB Seagate Barraccudas. I got generic CompUSA FireWire enclosures which now seems like a mistake.
December 5th, 2004 at 4:44 pm
Paul adds this Comment:
I work at CompUSA, and as such got those same enclosures for close to $30 a piece (best deal I could find that didn’t require shipping).
It works perfectly (though I only have one), and I can run my iPod through it should i need to and it all works fine (all this on my 12″ iBook G4).
The only problem I have is that I can’t get OS X to install on the drive, or after CCC’ing my main drive to the one in the enclosure, I can’t boot from it.
Can you boot from your enclosure (either one)?
December 5th, 2004 at 5:10 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
I agree, one works great, but I need them both to work. I can connect the iPod to the enclosure, but I can’t connect the other enclosed drive to the enclosure. These are for backups so I haven’t tried to make either of them bootable.
December 5th, 2004 at 5:27 pm
Dave adds this Comment:
I bought two of these: http://www.argosy.co[...]t/hd360c.htm
Combo USB2 and FireWire 400, $38 ea. plus tax and shipping. They work great, both at the same time to different ports. Didn’t try daisy. Each comes with USB2 & FireWire cables, and the adapter for the small-sized FireWire port.
I got them here: http://www.pcmicrostore.com (undergoing maintenance right now)
December 5th, 2004 at 6:12 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
I’ve ordered a pair of these on recommendation from some friends. I’ll post a follow-up when I get them.
December 5th, 2004 at 6:15 pm
Isaack Rasmussen adds this Comment:
If you have a Prolific chipset, you might want to look into upgrading the firmware. Daisy chaining with this chipset was fixed/enabled with the most recent firmware version, that most people do not have.
And if you are running it on Windows with data corruption problems, this might help you.
http://www.isaack.in[...]vice-pack-2/
December 5th, 2004 at 11:53 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
Thanks for the info, I’ll try that.
December 6th, 2004 at 5:18 am
Paul adds this Comment:
Just found this – http://missig.org/ju[...]wire-device/
I have 3 of these drives running under mac os x.3.4 and each drive mounts and works flawlessly individually, but as soon as i daisy chain them together, Only the first drive mounts and the other 2 just spin. thanks zen
…then…
Averagezen, you’re seeing those problems because each chip is supposed to have a unique identifier… but the PL3507 sets them to 000 for each one
December 9th, 2004 at 7:09 am
alexking.org: Blog adds this Trackback:
Rsync Backup System
Last February I started looking at using my old PowerMac G4 (dual 500mhz, gigabit ethernet model) as a live backup server since I’d moved to the PowerBook full time for development. Nine months later, I’ve finally done it! I know several people t…
December 10th, 2004 at 6:10 pm
Anonymous adds this Comment:
For what it’s worth, check what model of the FW chip you use (System Profiler will tell if it’s Prolific, Oxford or Ingenio). If it’s Prolific PL3507, early revisions of the firmware will basically not set fw id to anything else then 0, and thus you can’t have two together as you get an ID clash.
Solution for Prolific might be a firmware flash over USB from Windows box – http://member.newsgu[...]Firmware.htm
If it’s Oxford, you *might* have a very early firmware version (although my experience is only with OXFW911, not OXFW922) and might need to flash it.
http://www.fwdepot.c[...]irmware.html should have a link to flasher.
Initio chips so far are the best in day to day usage (I have two Macally PHC-100AC enclosures), although required flashing of the firmware too to the new revision.
Any way, just guessing here.
December 31st, 2004 at 3:37 am
Alex adds this Comment:
Thanks. I was able to return these enclosures – check the post linked above for more info.
December 31st, 2004 at 11:04 am