Oxford 911 don't mount

[Don Montalvo]

excellent points! i'd like to add that firewire cables can be 
inserted incorrectly (that's right, i get clients calling all the 
time because they fried their firewire port or drive).

i always carry a couple of spare firewire cables (one 1' and one 3') 
incase a bad wire is causing problems (it gets added to the invoice). 
more often than not, since my clients are mostly graphic arts 
studios, a/v production houses and service bureaus, they move their 
firewire drives around alot. occasionally someone forgets to dismount 
the drive before disconnecting it (and won't admit it...but their 
co-workers give me the scoop when i get there anyway <g>).

i'm not sure if this works for everyone, but i noticed a few problems 
with some of the oxford911 boards on some of the enclosures such as:

1. apple system profiler crashes during launch

2. during reboot i get "drive not recognized...should i initialize or 
ignore" errors (or something to that effect).

3. drives mount alright but don't unmount (often times causing the 
finder to stall at the spinning beach ball)

we haven't found a fix for #1.

usually, running diskwarrior takes care of #2+3.

lastly, someone on the mm list pointed me to an apple document saying 
you should always dismount your firewire drives before shutting down 
or rebooting. not sure if i could find that document again...or if it 
was maybe a third party drive manufacturer's tech note.

hope this helps,
don