Tried Everything - Exteral Firewire Drive Connection Issues

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I have a Mac Mini G4 running OS 10.4.11. Up until recently, all was well. My Iomega external Firewire drive was humming along and I started having issues with the G4 (crashes, running slow, etc.). I backed up to the external drive, disconnected peripherals, and ran DiskWarrior on the G4. Problems were solved but a new one developed. I cannot get it to recognize the external drive. The drive seems to be working fine (I have connected it to another Mac and it checks out OK). On my G4, it won't mount, I can't see it using the Disk Utility and DiskWarrior can't see it either.

I've done just about everything related to this issue that has been suggested in these forums. I made sure hard disk preferences are checked to show external drives, I've tried to restart to set the start up disk and it's not there, I downloaded driver software from Iomega, I disconnected peripherals, and I switched cables and configurations and start up routines. Nothing has worked. No error messages. Drive works fine on another Mac with the same OS.

I suspect DiskWarrior reset some software related to the Firewire port? Any help would be appreciated.
 
Sounds like a bad FireWire port on the machine...

Do you have any other FireWire devices you could try with the Mac mini? If the Mac mini won't see any FireWire devices, I'd say the FireWire port's gone bad for some reason.
 
I doubt it is related to hardware. No damage and USB works fine. I suspect it is software related due to recent DiskWarrior use. Does Mac OS have somewhere to look? Does Mac OS have software/file that works with the Firewire port? FireWire Device Tree shows that there is a Firewire Bus but that no device is attached.
 
ElDiabloConCaca said:
Sounds like a bad FireWire port on the machine...
Click to expand...

If your hard drive also has a USB port that you have connected - then firewire won't work - only one kind of connection at a time, please!
USB is not related to Firewire in any way, but you can sure have problems if you try connecting the same device with both at the same time.

As ElDiabloConCaca mentioned, try a different Firewire device on your Mac. If another device does not work, then you have a problem with your Firewire port.
 
Firewire and USB not connect to same drive at the same time. No other Firewire devices work. Again, is this a software issue? Timing of DiscWarrior run and no Firewire is suspicious.
 
Tried resetting the PMU for the 4th time. Now it works!!!!! Thanks ElDiabloConCaca.

(I still think it's a software issue)
 
If it were a software problem, the FireWire port wouldn't work at all -- not just in a hit-and-miss situation.

If you still believe it to be a software problem, an "Archive and Install" installation of OS X would probably fix that. It will retain all your user data and applications and simply install a fresh copy of OS X on the drive, replacing or fixing any missing or corrupt drivers.

I doubt it's a driver issue, though -- the DiskWarrior thing sounds like a simple coincidence, not a cause-effect thing.
 
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