FW 400 ext hd keeps unmounting

hey there,

i have a dual 1.8 g5 powerpc here at work. i have a small 160gig firewire 400 and a big 2tb firewire 800 drive hooked up into the back of the machine. the machine keeps unmounting the FW400 drive without warning. its being used as a back up drive.

i was told that macs will sometimes just "choose" which firewire device to support when both the 400 and 800 ports are being used. i have since daisy-chained the drives together, and the small FW400 drive showed up fine.....for about 20min, then it just unmounted. any ideas? thanks in advance.

Just dealt with similar scene and after trying 3 different Firewire cables discovered 3 things;
1/Firewire Cable in red box seemed more reliable
2/ My MBP had an intermittent firewire issue - both 400 and 800
3/ My La Cie enclosure would unmount when it got to a certain temp - putting the drive into a Voyager Q and it was flawless.

So as you can imagine troubleshooting that lot was no picnic.


Click for full size

excuse poor pic quality.

thats really interesting. the cable i have is gold plated so it looks pretty similar to what you have.

our IT guy said it might be the drive thats going bad, thats why it keep unmounting. so we reformatted it and it mounted right away. started a back up, but halfway thru the backup it unmounted again.

just for fun, i mounted the drive on another computer and its going on 2 hours now without unmounting (usually unmounts within 10-15 min). could it be something with my computer?

thanks again.

EDIT: just a note, this all started after we installed that 2tb FW800 drive. the FW400 drive worked fine for a good year and a half before that.

Sounds similar to my scene - weeks of trying to nail the combination that did not work, as most of the time when it was all cold all was good but when the session extended then odd effects started up.
This is the one i used to test the faulty enclosure;
Voyager Q drive dock (Review)