The Firewire bus on my Powerbook is dead. Most annoying. But wait, because the story is longer and more complex than you might think…
Last week, I had brought my Powerbook into work, as I often do. At work I have a 800Mbps Firewire HDD that I use for ‘home burns down’ kind of backups. I usually plug it in when I arrive and have the scheduler take care of business around lunch time.
Meanwhile in another part of the building, Thor was having problems with his iPod. That in itself is a long and convoluted story, but suffice to say that his iPod was refusing to mount on his Powerbook, and thus he hauled it down to our floor. First Jeremy, who also has a Powerbook (we are legion), gave it a go, no dice. And then Thor came hoppin’ along to me. I tried various combinations, but I couldn’t mount it either. At one point I also rebooted, and when OS X came back up, I noticed that Tron (that’s my external HDD) was missing. Launching System Profiler, I could suddenly see that the Firewire Bus was acting weird…
And it was about that time I found out Jeremy’s Firewire bus was gone…
So. What’ve we got then? Three Powerbooks, all with dead firewire ports. Bugger. And after jumping through a couple of hoops (resetting the PRAM, leaving the battery out over night and so on), it seemed evident that it was beyond the brink.
Fitting as it is, that we’re a few days from my little titanium-clad baby’s birthday…
So barring any revolutionary solutions popping up in the next day, I’m going to give Apple a little call and have them send the nice UPS man to pick it up. Thor got his back in 3 days flat, and that is if nothing else, a slight comfort.
PS: Did I mention that my iPod also decided to die on me recently? Yep.
Sounds like the iPod was destroying FireWire wherever it went. I dub thee FireWrecker destroyer of ports and cause of much grief.
Wow, talk about grief. That doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in 2 of the products I am planning on purchasing in the near future. So do you have any indication what is wrong with your iPod and why it won’t work? Please keep us updated on the status of the Powerbook as well. Hope it gets resolved quickly for you.
Yeah, another Mac fan standing up and saying “hey- what’s going on?”. Q&I of Apple’s post-2000 products are getting me down too- There is comfort in that Warranty, compared to most companies out there they do seem to care when dealing with broken bits and peices that’s good to see. 3 days, wow- they took my iPod from Scotch-Land to your part of the world and back in 10. I was amazed, and incredibly happy with the nice UPS man also.
i have the same issue and i’ve come to the conclusion that i blew it because of muck in the iPod’s firewire socket.
still charges ok, but just won’t pass data. fortunately i found a dual usb/firewire connector that lets me use the iPod semi-normally for now, pending getting some spare cash to have the thing fixed.
My iPod resets whenever I try to do anything with it. Unless it is in the dock. If it’s docked it works fine. Also, if I start playing something while it’s in the dock and subsequently remove it, it’ll continue playing for 15-20 minutes and then die.
I have tried a few things, and nothing seems to work. So a few days ago I filled out an iPod Service Request. Supposedly it is very fast; and Thor even got what look like a brand new iPod back, so I can only hope the same happens to me :)
Generally, it’s my impression that Apple’s support service is good and efficient… I hope so anyway. I don’t want to be without my Powerbook over Christmas :(
My powerbook came back today. They had replaced the RAM and my firewire bus now shows up. The iPod (which I had replaced), however, still doesn’t mount. It mounts if I use an USB-cable, but not the firewire. So maybe the faulty ram in the powerbook destroyed everything in its path – who knows. But it does sound e bit far fetched. Maybe it’s just a lot of different issues colliding, making it difficult to track down.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens when my girlfriend’s iPod gets back from repairs (the old battery issue).
Firewire is teh 3v0l!
Thor, did they mention if they upgraded firmware or anything else?
Nick:
Not to my knowledge. The repair slip actually only said “Diagnostics run on unit”, so I called them for elaboration. I wanted to know if there was a ‘soft’ trick, so I could help Micheal and Jeremy. The guy at apple support, however, said they’d replaced my RAM. He didn’t mention a firmware update.
Huh. It sort of sounds like some kind of virus. Have you seen reports of this happening widely?
Apples Support Service had a quite bad reputation a while back (well in the UK alteast, the US always seems to get the best of everything, but thats another matter) but Ive been quite impressed with to fairly recent problems: Our family iMac had an odd crashing thing and they were happy to replace it but the shop did anyway; My iBook that I sold to a friend had the classic iBook video problem (although I had ahem dropped it) and they fixed it within a week, that was a worrying one as it was just out of warranty and the guy I sold it to was used to PCs – but no, no problems, fixed and back within a week.
For some reason I seem to be quite lucky with my personal Macs (touch aluminium ;-) ) Ive yet to have a problem that wasnt self induced – IE dropping a liquid of some kind on the PowerBook keyboard, mind you even then a quick upturned tap on the desk and its fine :-D
What a shame…that’s too bad. Luckily apple gives decent service or you’d be without you PowerBook for some time then.
Best of luck to you…hope all goes well with the iPod too.
This all reminds me of an old memory circuit I have lying around somewhere. I’ts an old 128 MB SDRAM circuit and it worked quite well until one day. That day it decided that my old faithful Athlon of 1 Ghz had surpassed it’s lifespan. The computer had been running for about a month without reboots and suddenly hanged, I rebooted, nothing, not a beep, not even a blink. Flip up the old case and take a look inside, four red LED:s in the back, not a good sign.
Well I had to by a new motherboard and a new CPU, but about a week later I figured I could put the old memory in my router. I was quite wrong I have to say, my nice 450 mhz router booted once, I was able to see that it only found one memory circuit. The second reboot nothing happened.
I know today (about a year later) that the memory circuit somehow made the two CPU:s break, maybe the took their own life because of the memory, I don’t know. Anyways I’m going to keep that old circuit nowadays known by the name “Memory of death”.
Michael, I hope everything works out with your PowerBook and your iPod. It’s sure a shame if you will have to spend christmas without your PowerBook ;-)
This may not be of any help, but the other day I had something very similar happen, on a PowerBook G4 with FW800 running 10.3.6. I have an external FW800 drive I use for backup, and a 3G iPod attached to the FW400 port.
While rearranging some cables on my desk, I accidently unplugged the FW800 drive’s power supply while it was mounted. I plugged it back in right away, and didn’t appear to have a problem — in fact, I went ahead and did a backup to it.
The next time I rebooted, however, neither the FW800 drive nor the iPod would mount. System Profiler couldn’t even find a firewire port.
After scanning a few websites for similar problems, I decided that before I called AppleCare I’d try a few things. First, I unplugged all FW devices and tried resetting the PRAM. This made no difference. Next, I reset the PMU. After it booted, I attached the FW 800 drive and it came right up. The iPod still wouldn’t mount, however. I unplugged everything, and went back and reset the PRAM again, and both units came back and appear to be running fine.
As I said, this may not be of any help in your case, but it might be worth trying resetting the PMU if you haven’t done so already.
Best of luck!
Mmh…now I’m scared by my RAM and by my iPod and by my PowerBook! :(
Let us know how it goes…
Good luck!
I feel for you, my ipod chewed through three pairs of headphones (the stock ones, and two different sets of apple comfort buds). I use my powerbook ( :] ) with Deja Vu to schedule my backups to my iPod…
I have a feeling iPod (the new part of apple) is becoming tainted since the introduction to PC users. (im kidding, right?)
Hope things work out.
Sounds like you’re not having any luck recently.
I can’t say I’ve had any issues with my PowerBook or my iPod, and I hope it stays that way. I did buy AppleCare for the PB one year after I bought it and I will most likely buy it for the iPod too. You never know what’s going to happen and I don’t think I could live without either of them.
Best of luck and keep us updated!!
Even Apple hardware isn’t always happy puppies. Even the sun has it spots. Oh btw. you might want to get rid of that firewire, I suspect that satan lives in it ;-)
I also had similar problems with erratic firewire behaviour; external hard drives that did not mount, ipods that did not mount. I did some searching on the web and found that I was not alone. It seems that 10.3.6 sometimes creates unstable firewire behaviour. I was a bit sceptical initially that this could be the problem, but nothing else worked, so I tried downgrading my system to 10.3.5. This solved all of my firewire problems. I am away from my computer now so I don’t have the links to the info I found, but a quick search on the Apple support forums will show you that others are having similar problems. If you are using 10.3.6 this might be worth a try.
Thor –
That’s just incredibly odd. If it’s nothing to do with settings/software, and since this seems to only affect Powerbooks, then there could be some distance thing going on with the RAM and firewire connections. Maybe some kind of surge from the firewire connection caused the RAM to die.
If the other guys have access to any spare RAM, would be interesting to pop out the current sticks and pop in some test ones.
Good luck though! I was blown away to hear of these issues with Apple hardware.
I don’t think this is just a PowerBook issue. The very same Firewire problem has appeared on both my wife’s iBook and a friends iBook. We’ve tried resetting the PRAM and PMU but to no avail. Haven’t tried downgrading to OS 10.3.5, yet.
Good luck with that firewire. I really doubt that the iPod could have broken things like that – I’d recommend resetting the PMU and the Open Firmware and all that fun stuff.
I bet it comes back up!
Well… the saga continues.
(to Matthew: I have reset every orifice that my Powerbook chose to offer to me, nothing worked)
I just read this post in the Apple Discussions though, which is rather coincidental:
I was transferring files from an external firewire device (80GB disk, Formac Energy, powered from the firewire) to a new iBook (using 10.3.6). Everything was fine. But after a while, the drive disappeared (I noticed it, but was not able to remember if something special happened).
I went to connect the firewire device to a PowerBook G4 (using 10.3.6) and the drive was recognized, mounted and everything was OK.
I went back to the iBook and connected the firewire disk. It received power from the firewire but was not “mounted” by the system.
I went back to the PowerBook, connected the firewire disk and everything was OK.
BUT…..
After having done this several times (connecting, deconnecting, connecting another disk from LaCie), it appeared that finally the PowerBook was not able to mount the firewire disk anymore.
I tried to connect a Digital Cam, using iMovie on the PowerBook and on the iBook. The Digital Cam was not recognized neither.
In the system profiler, the firewire is detected.
When a firewire disk is connected, “disk utilities” do not see it.
I was wondering wether something was out of order from a hardware standpoint, when I saw the information about firewire problems in the discussions.
Does anyone have ideas on why firewire connection that use to work, suddenly, without apparent reasons, suddenly do not work anymore. And moreover, it seems impossible to get out of this situation (restart, using external power for the devices, etc.).
Hoping to find some help.
Evil!
Michael, did you ever try taking out your RAM ?
What I find really odd about this whole thing, is how it would seem that my powerbook killed my ipod, which in turn killed Michael’s and Jeremy’s powerbooks. Viral, almost.
Jeremy, I did try and disconnect my RAM, leaving just one of them in, booting up. Didn’t do anything with either of them…
I haven’t actually reset the PMU, but since you have, Jeremy, I’m betting it won’t do much good… But what is the combination for doing that again?
Back to apple my iPod goes.
Mac OS X 10.3.6 has problems with FireWire drives. Last time this happened, lots of data loss occurred; luckily this time drives simply don’t mount.
Lacie quickly released a firmware update for all their d2 drives, so if you’re using one be sure to get it. I had no more problems with my externals after that.
Michael, check the Mac Help for startup key combo’s ;-).
Have you also tried applying the 10.3.6 Combo Update on your existing installation? Maybe something messed with your FireWire kernel extensions?
Yeah, I did try reapplying the 10.3.6 combo update.
Michael,
PMU Reset key combos for all of the PowerBooks and iBooks are here.
Be sure to unhook any FW cables first, and wait for the machine to fully boot before you try to hook up anything external. I had to reset my PRAM one more time afterwords before I got the iPod to come up as well.
Good luck!
Hmmm ny Powerbook and iPOD at the moment seem to be working properly although one strange thing is sometimes when I turn on the iPOD the display will have a line flickering across the display. After a while it seems to go away after the display has warmed up or something.
Oh well that sucks you had a total Apple meltdown.
Damn… This is what deters me from getting an OS I love to death running on hardware that is designed to be so beautiful and simple.
Michael’s experience here is not the only time I’ve heard of such hardware hassles on Macs. My university’s solution center (where they fix computers) has almost twice more Macs with hardware problems as compared PCs. Again, most of them happen to be those Titanium laptops (beautiful stuff…)
Wanted to get a TiBook this thanksgiving but put it off; love the software, just don’t trust the hardware.
I too have run across this; it only happens when my iPod has been in a cold room for a long time. Goes away after less than 30 seconds, so I’m sure it’s nothing.
Both firewire sockets in my AGP G4 400 tower (OS X 10.3.9) ceased to work near the same time as a grayscreen kernel panic event. Since then not only will no iPod or external HD appear on the desktop, but even System Profiler and Tech Tool Pro can detect no firewire funcionality in the G4 whatsoever. In Techtool the firewire test under Hardware is even grayed out. This tells me that the internal 3rd firewire plug also won’t work.
I have run all maner of repairs. I have reset PRAM. Reset PMU. Removed and reinstalled battery. Target mode will not work. Nothing. No firewire functionality whatever. I plan to next try to do a system restore installation for OS X 10.3, or 10.3.3m trying to overwrite the 10.3.9. Hearing from others about any other similar experiences would be very welcome.
Sincerely,
Mason Gill
I’m having the same problem and I’m gutted about it. It started when I plugged in a colleague’s bus powered fw400 drive yesterday. It mounted, I used it without any problem. When I got home I plugged in my LaCie pocketdrive which refused to mount. The light came on and the drive spun up so it was getting power, but wouldn’t mount. I then tried a MacWay FW drive, a LaCie triple interface FW400/FW800/USB2, and my iPod mini. The same thing happened with all of them. The powerbook supplies power but doesn’t ‘see’ the drives. Today I tried plugging in a device into the FW800 port presuming it would just work but lo and behold the same thing is happening.
I’ve tried resetting the PRAM, the PMU, repairing disk permissions, taking out the battery, nothing works.
The very odd thing though is that apple system profiler still shows a firewire bus, saying:
“FireWire Bus:
Maximum Speed: Up to 800 Mb/sec”
Other reports of blown FW ports seem to suggest that it disappears from system profiler altogether?