No more than 2 Firewire Drives in Leopard??

mensadoc · #1 October 27th, 2007, 01:08 AM

Is anyone else experiencing flakey Firewire drive performance with Leopard? I've been running a MacBook Pro with Tiger and a chain of six Firewire drives for the past year with no problems.
Tonight I upgraded to Leopard, and my Firewire has suddenly gotten really flakey. For one thing, I seem to only be able to connect two drives to the chain. If I add a third, it doesn't mount (I've tried several variations of order, drives, and cables; but the results are the same).
What's more, I then also cannot UNmount any of the drives either by dragging to the trash or selecting "Eject". When I do so, the drives simply don't unmount; and the only way to get them disconnected is to restart the computer.
Fortunately I did a full SuperDuper clone backup before I installed Leopard; so I can go back to Tiger easy enough; but I'm hoping there's an easy fix for this problem.
Anyone got any ideas?

mensadoc · #2 October 27th, 2007, 01:24 AM

Here's another tidbit to add to the puzzle. With two Firewire drives connected I observed normal disc data transfer rates in the Activity Monitor, but the data rate on the Activity Monitor immediately dropped to zero when I switched on power to a third drive (which never did appear on the desktop). When I switched off the power to that third drive again, data transfer rates went right back to normal with no alert from the Finder that a disc had been incorrectly disconnected/removed.

jah457 · #3 October 27th, 2007, 05:30 AM

FYI - I have successfully chained three drives with my new iMac using Leopard.

Lt Major Burns · #4 October 27th, 2007, 06:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jah457

FYI - I have successfully chained three drives with my new iMac using Leopard.

firewire?

luclodder · #5 October 27th, 2007, 06:53 AM

I have chained 5 FireWire drives here, iMac G5 20" iSight with Leopard.
No problems here.

jah457 · #6 October 27th, 2007, 07:13 AM

Yes, with FireWire. They are WD externals drives, two 500GB, and one 1TB. Everything seems fine with me.

Good luck finding your problem

TTYL
Jah457

Y-not® · #7 October 28th, 2007, 07:49 AM

Thats 8 Firewire Drives on 3 Busses. A Fire Wire 800 Card, Internal 800 & internal 400 where the 400 Buss has 3 Chained and the 800 take the rest. I had more Problems with the Update 10.3.6 to 10.3.7 (firewire wouldn't Boot and damaged the Bootsector) then I had with a complete System update Leopard.
Fix permissions and repair all drives before you install, and generally Backup regularly, TimeMachine makes it easier starting now.

mensadoc · #8 October 28th, 2007, 08:11 AM

Thank goodness I made a SuperDuper clone right before I installed Leopard!! After a lot of fooling around and wasted time with Leopard, I reinstalled my old Tiger clone and ran DiskWarrior (which found a lot of things to fix - shame on me for not running it BEFORE I upgraded). I then saved a new clone of the repaired Mac separately before installing Leopard again. This morning my MacBook Pro seems to be OK with everything I've tried except that I haven't yet tried to plug in my external drive array. That's my next step, and I'll let you know how that turns out.