Sixth FW drive won't mount...

MrLatte23

Registered
I have six external hard drives connected to a Mac Pro (2 X 2.66 GHz Dual Core Intel Xeon) via FW800 (daisychained). All are Quad interface, Oxford 924 chipsets; three are OWC single drive bays, one is an OWC dual bay two drive bay and two are CoolGear drives. Each time I connect the sixth drive it brings the whole lot down. I've swapped the order of the drives and checked the cables and everything works until the sixth drive is connected and powered up.

Anyone know of any reason why this occurs? And any way of stopping it from happening.
 
Are any of the drives bus-powered, or do they all have dedicated power supplies?
 
They all have dedicated AC power supplies. I currently have the sixth one running on the front FW400 port. Two are 500 Gb Hitachi (original drives from the Mac Pro), the rest are Seagate 750 Gb (2) and 1 TB drives (2).
 
Does that drive cause the same downing of the FireWire bus if it's connected by itself?

It does not. I've rotated the drives (changed the wiring) so that different drives were last on the line and in every combination connecting the sixth one unmounts the whole chain. As soon as I disconnect the last drive they all reappear. I thought I had two bad cables, since it happened with two different drives, so I went and bought another and that's when I realized that it's just when connecting and powering up the sixth one that everything ejects.
 
So... it's the sixth drive in the chain, and not necessarily a specific drive?

That sounds like some kind of kink in the Firewire bus/controller on the computer... are there any relevant entries in any of the logs in Console.app?
 
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