[X4U] FireWire quits working

[Stroller]

On 23 Sep 2006, at 23:04, John Erdman wrote:
> ...
>  I use a 120 GB Hard drive in a Firewire enclosure with an Oxford  
> bridge.  For some unknown reason the iMac has stopped recognizing  
> that drive but the G4 sees it fine. (It's only connected to one  
> computer at a time).

Dumb question, but have you tried plugging the drive into another  
firewire port?

I ask this because recently I thought my G5 had stopped mounting  
external firewire hard-drives; I figured it was a software problem  
because my iSight worked fine. It was only after I tried connecting  
another device to the front firewire port that I realised that only  
this one was affected & that drives (and my iSight!) plugged into the  
back work fine.

I'm really hoping that in my case it's just a loose connector between  
the motherboard & the front-panel firewire port, but I'm kinda scared  
because of an incident which occurred around the time this failed. I  
had a firewire device sitting on the floor and connected using a long  
cable, turned my back and about two minutes later saw my recently  
adopted house-rabbit had just taken a chomp out of the cable,  
severing both the braided-metal shielding and more than one of the  
wires inside!! I hope this did not cause a short-circuit and hardware  
damage, but I haven't yet shut down the machine to check the cable  
for looseness.

> It appears that the iMac has lost the FW bus.. Is this posssible?  
> or a likely diagnosis?

Yes, I'm sorry to say it is possible.

Stroller.