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TICKET ARCHIVE -> MacBook Pro does not see firewire HD

tbroox - Mar 4, 2007 - 2:08 pm

I'm a graphic designer. Until this weekend, I was using a mirror door G4 that was working perfectly until my husband had to borrow my G4 for his business (long story). Anyway, I copied some essentials off the G4 to the Seagate firewire drives I use to store projects, and have been trying to set up my biz on this nice new MacBook Pro (Intel Core 2 Duo) we bought in Dec 06. It was installed with OS 10.4.8. I think my mirror door G4 was on OS 10.4.2 or thereabouts.

My problem is that this MacBook is not consistently seeing the Seagate firewire drives. I plugged in one and it gave me the unrecognizable disk message, so I ran Disk Utility and repaired the Seagate, and it mounted fine.

Then I plugged in another Seagate, and it did not mount and did not even show the drive in Disk Utility. I tested the firewire cable and that's not the problem.

Does anyone have any clues as to what could be wrong? Thanks much.

(I would appreciate the quickest possible reply because I can't run my business without access to my projects!)

kellhound1 - Mar 6, 2007 - 10:53 am

Aha! Does Seagate offer firmware or software updates for your particular external HDs? There are occasional firmware updates for HDs (and when I say "occasional" I mean rarely).

Now, the one you repaired and mounted, does that consistently mount or not? If it does, then you should retry Disk Utility on your remaining HDs. Some times you have to re-cycle the power and reboot the HDs. See if that works. Your computer might be getting somewhat confused with switching similar drives. You mount the first one, unmount it, and then connect a similar Seagate...maybe you could try to reboot your machine then connect the other HDs. Perhaps that would work.

Also (and you may have already done this) perform a software update on your machine. You can do this by clicking on the blue Apple logo on the top left-hand-side of the main menu and selecting "Software Update."

Another possibility is the change to a different computer. I experienced a problem with my old PowerMac G5 and an external FireWire Maxtor drive. The HD wouldn't mount or even be recognized by my PowerBook G4, no matter what I tried. I eventually went back to my PowerMac and repaired the disk permissions on the HD, plugged it back into my PowerBook, and it mounted once I formatted with Disk Utility. Same might be going on in your case.

Apple Support offers a suggestion regarding an unrelated issue. They instruct to download the latest FireWire update for MacBook Pro's at their download page. Unfortunately, I couldn't find one specifically for MacBook Pro's. You may have better luck browsing through their pages.

Let me know how all of this plays out for you. If you still experience problems I'll do some more research and get back to you.


Sincerely,
Vishad
macosx.com

tbroox - Mar 7, 2007 - 2:45 pm

Vishad, thank you for your response. I did not check for firmware updates because the problem has resolved. The situation you described with your G5 and Maxtor was the same problem I was having -- my Mac Book did not even acknowledge that a new disk was being connected at all, so I didn't even get the unrecognized disk message. What eventually happened was that I left the drive unplugged for a while and repaired permissions on my Mac Book. When I reconnected the Seagate, voila, it shows up fine. I guess it was a combination of recycling the power and repairing permissions that did the trick. Again, thank you for your advice!