I use a Western Digital 160gb external firewire drive on my powerbook g4 677Mhz. I am running Os X 10.4.2 with all the latest updates.
The problem I have is that every couple of days, the drive freezes. I usually notice it because iTunes hangs (and my music is all stored on this drive). I try to force kill itunes but it won't quit. If I try to eject the firewire drive from Finder, Finder hangs, and won't restart. Eventually, the entire menu-bar freezes. I am unable to eject the disk with hdiutil unmount -force /Volumes/Ruby/ (where Ruby is the name of the drive) and it just hangs and never completes executing.
This problem is getting really annoying! I can usually force quit the drive manually, (holding the power button down for 10 seconds or so) although I really hate to do that! Rebooting doesn't remount the drive, so I still have to force it to power down.
I work on this laptop remotely, so the powerdown issue is not even an option alot of the time! Any help would be greatly appreciated (even if it is another way to force the drive to unmount, so I can at least work on other things!)
Thanks in advance!!
Steve
The problem I have is that every couple of days, the drive freezes. I usually notice it because iTunes hangs (and my music is all stored on this drive). I try to force kill itunes but it won't quit. If I try to eject the firewire drive from Finder, Finder hangs, and won't restart. Eventually, the entire menu-bar freezes. I am unable to eject the disk with hdiutil unmount -force /Volumes/Ruby/ (where Ruby is the name of the drive) and it just hangs and never completes executing.
This problem is getting really annoying! I can usually force quit the drive manually, (holding the power button down for 10 seconds or so) although I really hate to do that! Rebooting doesn't remount the drive, so I still have to force it to power down.
I work on this laptop remotely, so the powerdown issue is not even an option alot of the time! Any help would be greatly appreciated (even if it is another way to force the drive to unmount, so I can at least work on other things!)
Thanks in advance!!
Steve
