OT: Firewire for Mac help please!

1. Never do OS upgrades unless the HD's are attached.

1. When old data in old formats are mission critical, maintain at least one CPU that recognizes them reliably until you upgrade the DATA STORAGE system.

I can hook it up to my G4, but you might be paranoid about my seeing your data.

A few beers . . . .

Or just email me for a professional solution.

Jerry

Robert

Just a guess: Did you just do a system up-date? This sounds a lot like the problems lots of people are having when they do an update to OS

10.3.7.

I don't have an answer for you, as I have held off doing this update, but you might want to call Apple's support line. If you don't want to do that then go to

and see if you can find a solution there.

This is actually one upgrade you want to do with the drives disconnected as it seems to mess with the firmware of the external drives.

Mark

Howdy!

No recent upgrades, although I noticed that I have had to re-do the start up sequence with OS 10 three times now. (Should I have registered?). I rarely use 10 except to get some web pages to load fully. Still running 9.2.2 after all these years. I went to the apple site today and realized with dial-up upgrades are impossible. I'll look at the other site you mentioned.

I again tried all my different extension selections, it certainly did not make it work. That remote FW hard drive never worked on the Pismo, heck, the airport only works if I have the G4 already on line. (It won't connect by itself). I also verified that the titanium won't read dvd's either. I barely ever used it except to load the original programs. (I never have had to reload the system software in 4 years, so it held up pretty darn good)

BTW, all programs still work and print good, so I'm not DOA yet.....

Thanks for the advise, I will check it out. Robert Rosenfield

There is someone who is technologically crippled :)

To clarify, TWO different external devices fail to work with TWO computers using TWO different cables? but your iPod DOES work?

Since you haven't recently updated the OS, the most likely scenario would be some common software problem clobbering those two devices; but the fact that the iPod works cuts that probability (The iPod is, after all, mostly a FireWire hard disk) BTW, you shouldn't keep seeing the registration prompt, unless you did a force-quit instead of normally quitting the registration program.

Another possibility, though hard to believe, is that two devices just happened to fail at about the same time...

Here's one to think about; happend to me, and really had me going. I bought an Imation FireWire tape drive:

-- Connected it to one computer, worked OK. Went to use it later, and it was dead.

-- Tried it on another computer, seemed OK.

-- Back to the first one, still dead.

-- Back to the second one, now dead THERE, too.

-- Tried it on a third computer, etc...

Eventually wound up blowing the FireWire ports on two motherboards, and a FW PCI card, before I realized it was blowing the ports as the drive was DISCONNECTED. Turned out it was the ATA-FW bridge board in the drive. Replaced that (and fixed all the computers) and all was well.

Scott,

For clarity, The Ipod only shows up on the G3 Pismo. I'm going to go check that both ports work the same (has two), now I'm paranoid to plug that one in! Also, I do get power from the G4 Titanium firewire port, it runs the external disk and charges the Ipod. Note that the Apple system profiler firewire port doesn't see anything on the G4, the G3 shows some codes.

Just weird that the external drive never has shown up on the G3 desktop, makes me wonder if it is going somewhere else (like off the screen, in a folder, who knows). Makes me want to get the new powerbook with superdrive built in (I still like the pismo with removeable modules design better, easier to replace the dvd drive if it dies).

Robert

iTunes itself conflicts with older devices. Perhaps disable the iTunes resources and restart.

I'm fiddling with an Iomega Jaz SCSI-to-FireWire converter right now; the company says it works in OS X, but you can't prove it by me. And they want $25 to answer questions about it.

A tool you may want is Peripheral Vision:

I find it massively useful because it notifies you whenever a USB or FireWire peripheral is connected or disconnected. That way, you know the connection is working, even if the device isn't functioning as you wish.

Based on your above comments, it sounds more and more likely your G4s FW port isn't working. (It's possible for it to supply power even if the data transfer function is dead.) My Jaz adapter at least shows cryptic codes when connected. This has to be because necesary software drivers aren't available; it works fine under OS 9 on the same computer.