[X4U] External drives

[Paul Moortgat]

In the English MacFormat magazine is the next text about external FW 
drives:

Since upgrading to Panther, my Firewire drive keeps losing files.  Why?

Solution: This problem occurs if your drive is left connected to the 
Mac when you shut down or restart.  Apple changed the firewire drivers 
for 10.3, which required a corresponding update in the drive firmware 
from certain manufacturers.  It only affects external Firewire drives 
that use the Oxford 922 bridge chipset with v1.02 of the firmware.  
This includes drives from Century Global, EZ Quest, Firewire Depot, 
Firewire Direct, Glyph, Granite Digital, LaCie, MacAlly, MacPower, 
Otherworld Computing, SmartDisk, Trans Intl and Wiebe Tech.  If your 
drive is one of these and the firmware hasn't been updated yet or if 
the manufacturer doesn't have a firmware update available, you need to 
make sure that you dismount the drive before shutting down by dragging 
the icon to the Trash.  Since Macs can sometimes fail to wake from 
sleep mode, it's a good idea to dismount the drive before allowing the 
computer to sleep too.  And if that wasn't already inconvenient enough, 
the official advice from Apple is that you also disconnect the FireWire 
Cable.
This means that you until you get the firmware patched, you can't boot 
from an external FireWire drive because it would need to be connected 
during startup and shutdown.


Are there members with this problem?

Paul Moortgat