eMac and firewire

[Daniel Gagner]

I work in a computer lab of a middle school. We have a bunch of late 
model eMacs. they've been great. None of the video problems that some 
of them had that I've read about. Lately though, I've noticed that 
firewire ports have been dying on me. I'm thinking it must be a 
hardware issue because I can't clone from some of them, I can't get a 
lacie firewire external drive to be recognized with some of them. My DV 
camcorder won't be recognized by some of them. Even profiler doesn't 
see the port. The computers are identical because they were cloned from 
each other. I've upgraded to 10.2.2 with no effect. I've even taken a 
couple of them and reformatted and installed the original 10.1.4 OS CD 
but still no firewire ports recognized. right now, out of 30 eMacs I've 
got about a 12 of them with this problem. Can anyone tell me if I'm 
missing something or am I going to have to send half my lab back to 
Apple for repair?