Firewire drive not visable to OS-X

T

tech_head

Registered
Hi,

I have a firewire drive that all of a sudden
is no longer available to OS X. OS 9 sees the
drive with no problems.

It happened all of a sudden.
I tried re-formatting the drive with no luck.
It just doesn't get recognized. I look in
the system profiler and the firewire device is
listed correctly but labeled as unavailable.

What gives?????

tech
 
the problem is not on the FW drive, it is on your system drive. You need to either run Diskwarrior on it or reformat it.

I guess you could try any other 3rd party disk repair programs you have but when i had this problem, DW was the only one to fix it. If you don't already have it i can tell you it is a good investment, especially if you go ahead and order the disk at the same time as you download it so you get plusoptimizer for free.
 
Hi,

So, if you can, explain what the heck is
going on?

The system boots normally and everything works
correctly except that my firewire drive is
not available.

So is there a corrupted driver/extension in
/System/Library/Extensions?

It doesn't make sense to format my system drive
just to get the firewire to work.

Thanks,
Kent
 
well, i am not a real technical person so exact names and locations of the problem are beyond me. but essentially the directory/volume structure that does the recognition is 'screwed up' (one of my favorite high tech terms). It needs to be repaired. Most times disk utility and fsck do not fix this because the thing they are trying to recognise is not on the same disk.

I have never had to reformat a disk since about system 3.x or so. (knock on particle board). but to avoid doing a reformat you are most likely going to have to invest in a 3rd party repair program. I personally don't think one can own too many of these apps but people from the 'nix world seem to disdain them. to each their own i guess.

doing regular maintainence is only good sense in my book. others like to let their drives deteriorate to the point of near extinction. the choice is a personal one.
 
Hi,

I guess that does explain it a little better.
I've never had this happen on any other UN*X
system that I have owned.

I own an Ultra Sparc running Solaris 7 and
have never had anything like this. On UN*X
the running of a disk utility just seems foreign to me.

tech
 
Hi,

Just an update.
I got the drive working.

There was a driver that was corrupted and
therfore disabled.

IOFireWireSerialBusProtocolTransport.kext in /System/Library/Extensions was corrupted and
the driver for the firewire bridge couldn't be loaded.

I replaced IOFireWireSerialBusProtocolTransport.kext from a backup and things worked fine.

Thanks,
Kent
 
glad to hear it. i'll have to remember this one for next time it happens to me.:)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top