External Firewire 800 Hard Drives Randomly Unmounting

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Macbook Pro 17" Core 2 Duo 2.33GHz. Following a logic board replacement for a separate issue.

I have two external Firewire 800 Hard drives (two separate brands and sizes) which have suddenly started unmounting randomly and giving the 'hardware removal error'. A few seconds after unmounting they mount again, only to unmount a minute later with the error again. It is now doing this in a loop.

I have done the following things:

1. rebooted and checked all cable connections

2. I have tried this with the two disks plugged in separately and daisychained.

3. I have tried two separate Firewire 800 cables.

4. running the Disk Utility.

5.installing the system from scratch on a freshly formatted internal disk.

6. reinstalling again with an archive and install.

Everything seems to work fine with a Firewire 400 connection.

The only software setting that I changed is to disable the "Put Hard Disks to Sleep when possible" option in the Energy Saver system prefs. Any connection? I have enabled this again and so far (a couple of hours) so good.

Should I be looking at a hardware issue - maybe a logic board problem again?
 
OK

Scratch that about the Energy saving option, the disk has just unmounted.

However, strangely, there appears to be a connection with iCal/iSync.

As soon as I launch iCal, the disk dismounts with the Hardware Removal error – and then goes into a loop of mounting and dismounting.

This happened in my previous system install whenever I launched iSync.

I've also noticed that Entourage is no longer syncing with iCal (which is a separate issue that I have been trying to fix).

What is going on?
 
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Ah no, scrub that also.

I've just rebooted the Mac and as soon as the desktop showed, the external Firewire 800 disk unmounted with the hardware error.

OK, I give up.

(I tried Zapping the PRAM also btw.)
 
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If this issue just popped up after the logic board replacement, perhaps it's related to that.

Does this issue persist if you log in under a different user account, boot in Safe Mode, or boot the computer from an alternate startup disk?
 
the exact same thing happening here. still looking into the ical connection.

anybody know something about this problem?
 
Hi
Also got FW800 slowness and self unmounting troubles.
Googling it showed me another forum about this problem and it was more interesting to read, but I think it is in the interest of the resolution of the problem for all of us to place a link here so that we can all benefit from the information available elsewhere.
Thus the link is :
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2597920
I'll be posting my description of the problem over there because I think it's important to have Apple knowing about this, since it's either related to Apple or to the FW drives we use, and reading posts we can see reports of the same problem from WD, Iomega, etc. So either we post at each drive brands or we centralize under Apple.

Thanks
 
I really appreciate you guys getting together to let Apple know about this, but.....
Apple Discussions is no more connected to Apple, Inc employees than this site is. If you read the terms of use there you will see it is a User-to-User support forum. As far as I know, the only Apple employee who regularly reads Apple Discussions is(are) the web site manager(s). You all need to post at
http://www.apple.com/feedback
 
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