Firewire Drive not recognized--MacDV Digest #2708

[Ted Langdell]

Several suggesgions that might work for you:

Have you tried hooking it up to another Mac?  If your  computer's OS 
has a problem, perhaps it might be recognized by another Mac.

I had trouble with two 120GB drives that I had been using for a 
substantial project.  I took them to my friendly Mac reseller at the 
time the G5's were introduced ahd hooked them up to a G5 with FCP to 
see what kind of a difference the G5 made in rendering a QT movie of 
the project.

It made a noticeable difference in speed, but OS 10.2.x also did some 
disk repairs that made both drives work fine when I got them back to my 
OS 9.2.2 machine in my office.

You might have a bad FireWire to IDE bridge in the Formac case.

I had a couple of Western Digital FW drives get flakey, possibly due to 
heat caused by lack of any ventilation in the case design.  Putting 
them in new large, fan-equipped ADC Pyro FireWire cases solved the 
problem, as the drives were just fine.  The WD cases' bridges were bad.

As another responder suggested, you can also take the drive out of its 
case, hook it into an internal IDE bus on a Mac and see whether it can 
be recognized as a standard IDE drive.

You might also see whether a standard IDE drive that you know worked 
internally will work in the Formac case.  That would help isolate 
whether its a bridge problem or a drive problem.


Ted Langdell
Ted Langdell Creative Broadcast Services
Marysville, CA

On May 19, 2004, at 5:30 AM, Macintosh Digital Video List wrote:

> Message-Id: <a06020403bcd0c1946f43@[192.168.0.2]>
> Date: Wed, 19 May 2004 08:48:39 +0100
> From: Mark Walker <mark at scip.org.uk>
> Subject: can't see formac ext disk
>
> hello all
> I've got a formac external 60Gb drive that I can't see in either OS9
> or OSX but which contains someone else's movies that I don't want to
> lose
> it did work in OS9, but I've never been able to see it in OSX - now
> in OS9 says it wants me to initialize it
> I've tried Diskwarrior and norton in OS9 but neither can do anything
> - they say it's not a macintosh disk
> and disk first aid can't see it
> any suggestions?
> I will pay a small amount if I need to, either for software or
> [local] help with recovery
> thanks
> mark
> -- 
> Mark Walker
> **************


Ted Langdell
Ted Langdell Creative Broadcast Services
Marysville, CA
Main:  	(530) 741-1212