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My PowerBook G4 has a firewire port. I know it worked once, because a certain someone who very recently dumped me, used it to put this nice backup I have on this nice external hard drive. But now I can't get it to work. I can see the drive and contents using the USB connection, no problem. Except that backing up that way takes 15 hours, AND (the worse part) I can't restore the backup from USB, it has to use the firewire. BUT I CAN"T SEE THE DISK AT ALL FROM THERE!!!! **WHAAAA!!!*** ::beats head against wall some more::

Date: 2008-08-26 05:23 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] saintbogz.livejournal.com
Hmmm...

Well, there are a few things that could cause a problem like yours.

If it's software, and you're not mounting the drive via firewire but have it hooked up through the firewire port, you'll probably still see a firewire device listed as attached when you look at the firewire bus via the System Profiler (accessed most easily by clicking on the "More Info" button found on the "About this Mac" dialog box, which you get by selecting "About this Mac" from the apple menu. If you can see an attached device, but don't mount it, you probably have a software problem. Honestly, I have no idea why that would happen.

Well, I have ideas, but the possible actual causes are fairly varied.

If system Profiler doesn't see anything attached to the port, you may have a hardware problem. I wouldn't bet more than a nice beer on any one possibility, though.

The hard drive itself works, so you've got three likely hardware failure possibilities:
1. The cable is bad.
2. The firewire port on you PowerBook is bad.
3. The firewire port on the drive enclosure is bad.

To see if the cable is bad, try switching to a known-good firewire cable.

If your drive isn't accessible from your PowerBook when using a known-good cable, try accessing the hard drive from a different Mac which has a known-good firewire port. If you can see the drive from a different mac using a known-good cable, then it's possible that your PowerBook firewire port is bad. *Possible*, not certain. If you can't see the hard drive from the Mac with the known-good port using the known-good cable, then it's possible that the firewire port on the drive is bad.

I know this crap is frustrating. Good luck.


Date: 2008-08-27 01:15 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] chocorua.livejournal.com
I can see the drive from my FreeBSD box via her FW cable and the enclosure, so they're probably good, but presumably because it's a backup, none of the HFS tools I can find will do anything more than list the partitions.

Date: 2008-08-28 08:10 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] saintbogz.livejournal.com
Have you got anything like a FW video camera or perhaps a different drive that you can attach to her FW port? If the Powerbook an read a different device, then it's a software issue. I assume (perhaps incorrectly) that when you (Jocelyn) say that you can't see the hard drive, that means that it doesn't mount, and if you run DiskUtility or look at the FW bus with SystemProfiler, there's nothing there to mount.

The Mac backup tools I'm aware of will generally create either a directory containing the backed up files or an image file of some sort at their target storage device. I'm not a pro, so my experience is somewhat limited, as I shopped around and stopped looking when I found something I really liked. (SuperDuper from ShirtPocket sofware, if you're interested... It's got very few bells and whistles and the registered version (~$30) allows scheduling backups over a network.)

What's the backup software being used?
Edited Date: 2008-08-28 08:13 pm (UTC)

Date: 2008-08-28 08:19 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] saintbogz.livejournal.com
Ah. I just saw your other post about going to the Genius Bar.

Well...

Your port could be flaky. Not gone yet. Just flaky.

Sorry I couldn't really help.

Date: 2008-08-26 07:09 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
Please get your facts straight before accusing someone of dumping you, when you are the one doing the dumping.
-M

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