Maxtor Firewire HD broke my Tiger and how I fixed it

MoNkeY mAgIc

MoNkeY mAgIc

Simian Deformity
Hi,

Here's a warning and a solution to a Tiger problem I found earlier today.

I installed Tiger on my iMac (angle poise one).

Installation went fine till reboot when it started with a Kernel Panic.
Plams got a bit sweaty, but I did the old favourite of unplugging all my extra hardware (External drives and the like, just in case).
Tiger booted fine.
Turns out it was my Maxtor One Touch external hard drive (firewire).
So I deleted the following:
System/Library/Extensions/IOFireWireMxBt.kext
System/Library/Extensions/MaxtorPowSecDriver.kext

Problem solved - Tiger plays nice now and my Firewire drive works fine.

Not sure what those extentions actually do, probably to do with the onetouch button (which I never use).

Hope this helps someone.

T
 
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
My Maxtor drive now works just fine with 10.4
after removing the two extensions.
I truly appeciate your help.
 
If you search this very forum for 'maxtor', you'll find this exact solution and some other hints to users of Maxtor external drives. Seems some users did have in fact to install newer drivers. Either way: Glad you're fine now. :)
 
Still raise the comment I made back on the previous maxtor posts.

As a registered user with maxtor, and them knowing my email, and them knowing the problem (they have a FAQ) a simple warning mail would have been welcome.
 
luckily i found your post, you saved me and kept my sanity.

i already thought that my years work on that drive was lost....

this is what i hate about updates. one never knows what does not work any more, but you can be sure that something does not. ::love::
 
Unfortunately, I have gone that road trashing those two extensions, with no luck. Maxtor's drivers are old (2003-2004), and they won't update the Mac ones. I spoke to their computer tech & programming engineer. Maybe some large volume of response from others may prompt action. A
 
You've posted this twice in separate threads, hoomuse, and I don't get the "A" at the end... I've got no problems at all with all three of my Maxtor drives. One of them's a Maxtor OneTouch, one is a OneTouch II drive. (The third's an older one.) I _did_ have problems back in the days, installed their drivers back then and the problem never came back.

So, there's basically two things one can do: Install the drivers - or remove them if they were installed before. If both things don't help, I'm not sure what could help. The reason Maxtor doesn't release newer drivers is: They're not needed anymore. Initially, when the OneTouch drives came out, Apple had a problem in OS X which ended in Kernel Panics when attaching the drive after booting. This problem was first solved by the newer drivers and then by Apple in OS X (making the drivers unnecessary). Now in Tiger the situation is clear, basically, from both companies' standpoint: You simply connect the drive and it works. At least that's how it's supposed to be.
But the reason for Maxtor not updating the drivers has nothing to do with them not supporting Macs or anything. It's just that from their point, there's no problem...
 
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