Mac OS X 10.3.6 Special Report: FireWire Issues: Drives disappearing or unmountable, corrupt volumes; solutions

The most widely reported problem with Mac OS X 10.3.6, and perhaps the most serious, is a loss of FireWire drive functionality -- an issue that appeared in previous incremental Mac OS X updates, including 10.3.5, 10.3.4, 10.3.3, and even the original Mac OS X 10.3 Panther release.

In previous cases, one viable workaround was to replace the IOFireWireFamily.kext (located in System/Library/Extensions) introduced by the incremental update with a version of the kernel extension from a system that had not been updated, or from an earlier update package. Unfortunately, the same workaround does not apply to Mac OS X 10.3.6, as the IOFireWireFamily.kext is not updated by the release.

MacFixIt reader Steve Smith is among the many users reporting this problem. He writes "After upgrading, I can no longer mount my Crossfire 160 GB firewire hard drive. The OS eventually gave me a dialogue box about a drive that was not recognizable by the OS and I selected the Eject button in the dialog. A Que QPS drive daisy chained on the same firewire port mounts just fine."

Issues are not restricted to mounting -- many users are finding that they can no longer boot from previously working FireWire drives. Gabriel Dorado writes "After updating external, booting FireWire disks from several manufacturers from Mac OS X 10.3.5 to 10.3.6 (booting from them when applying the standalone combo updater), it is not possible to boot from such disks any more. Even worse: the data inside some of such disks is totally or partially lost!"

Not all drives are affected by the Mac OS X 10.3.6 issue -- manifestation of the problem appears dependent on the chipset being used by the drive mechanism, though we've been unable (as of yet) to pinpoint a specific set or manufacturer.

There are a few ways to approach this problem.

First, make sure your FireWire drive's firmware is up to date. In response to the last major FireWire failure episode, Apple recommended that users check with their drive manufacturers for possible firmware revisions and some users who are experiencing the current problem found resolve in the same manner.

a number of drive manufacturers have posted firmware updates that purport to resolve these issues. Among them are Initio , MacAlly and SmartDisk (At left, choose Portable Hard Drives, then Firelite Firewire. In the list, article #1141 is near the top.).

Initio's firmware ReadMe states:

"Apple made a change in their Mac OS 10.3.6 FireWire driver and now requests a very big packet and when we try and send a large packet back it won?t accept it so Apple keeps re-trying until Apple timeouts. Sometimes after a few minutes and Apple timing out, the hard drive will then appear on the Mac OS desktop, but not always, depending on what previous Initio firmware is on the FireWire 400 bridge you have. So what we did is break up the larger packet into smaller packets so Apple can accept it. [...]"

We've also received confirmation from Other World Computing that their drives are unaffected by the FireWire issues reported with the OS X 10.3.6 Update and thus need no firmware update.

Second, if your drive enclosure also offers USB 1.1 or USB 2.0 connectivity, attempt the connection via the alternate port. A number of users report that while drives cannot mount or boot properly when connected via FireWire, they can do so without issue when connected via USB.

MacFixIt reader Ken Watters writes "I have a G5 iMac and a 160 GB Acomdata firewire/USB external drive. Following the installation of the 10.3.6 update, the external drive could not be recognized when connected by firewire. It would neither mount nor be recognized by Disk Utility. Hooking it up via USB 2.0 solved the problem immediately."

Third, if access to your FireWire-only drives is critical, you can perform a reversion to Mac OS X 10.3.5.

Fourth, make sure no FireWire drives are connected to your system while you apply the Mac OS X 10.3.6 updater. A number of users have reported data loss or drive corruption, both of which may be avoided by properly unmounting then disconnecting your FireWire drive prior to beginning the update process.

Finally, it appears that a permissions flaw may be the problem in some cases.

Calvin Van Ourkerk writes:

"I found a surprisingly simple fix to the non-booting Firewire drive problem.

"I clicked on the drive icon, did a Get Info, and found that the permissions had been set to 'Ignore ownership on this volume.' I unchecked the box, and voila!, I could then use the Disk Utility to repair the permissions and make the disk bootable again."

Resources

10.3.5

10.3.4

10.3.3

Initio

MacAlly

SmartDisk

reversion to Mac OS X 10.3...

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