When Firewire Ports Go Bad

A friend as a Firewire port that's slowly going. As it gets progressively worse it starts to do some interesting things when you mount Firewire hard drives or cameras. One thing is this when you mount an HVX-200:

As you can see the files listed on here not only are not real files you'd find on an HVX-200 mount but they make no real sense. This behavior was consistent with only the names changing.

For me, the most interesting thing was that FCP would see the footage while the P2 card was mounted like this but there would be massive artifacts during playback. Plugging the exact same camera and card using the same Firewire cable on another Mac acted normally.

Out of curiosity I reset the PRAM, SMC and all that on the Mac without any of it helping.

Loose FW800 Cables

xlr8yourmac.com has a interesting observation on clear-jacketed FW800 cables:

FYI on Loose Port fit with some FW800 cables (seen w/several clear-sleeved cable samples) - Twice in the last few days I've seen problems with some FW800 devices mounting. In all cases it was due to a loose/sloppy fit of the cable's FW800 connector in the Mac's FW800 port and with some (even slight) tension on the cable connection end. (Seen with FW800 ports on a Mac Pro and a MacBook Pro.)

Each time the sloppy fit was with a clear jacketed (showing shield braid) FW800 cable. (Clear sleeved cables with black FW800 connector tips.) These cables all came with different products, bought at different times but I suspect they may be from the same OEM cable mfr.

In fact after seeing this twice in the last few days, I went back and checked a similar made (clear sleeve) cable I've had for a couple years but rarely used - a FW800 to FW400 cable.

Tip to use older Firewire devices under Snow Leopard

Macosxhints.com has an interesting tip on replacing a newer ktext file with an older one to get some older firewire devices to mount/work under Snow Leopard.

I haven't had any firewire devices that fail to work under Snow Leopard but this is good to know if you run into the problem.

Speeds of Bad Firewire Cards

I thought the difference in speed between an iffy PCI FW card on an emailer's G5 and the built-in FW800 using the same hard drives and same cables was intersting. It's the difference between a 3+hour copy and a 22min one. I'm not sure what the cause is as they're still trying to troubleshoot it.

Good Speed:


Bad Speed:

Snow Leopard and Firewire Problems

From xlr8yourmac.com: (there's no direct link to the posting, sorry)

Reader's workaround for Snow Leopard Firewire problems - My main work machine is still running 10.5.8, but have 10.6.1 running on other Macs and I've not seen any FW issues like this so far, but only used a FW HD dock with them once. (As far as external drives, I've primarily been using an eSATA JMB360 Expresscard connected eSATA HD dock with the 10.6.1 MBP.)
" Firewire and Snow Leopard
Since installing Snow Leopard I had problems with two Firewire DVD burners, one would not mount disks and the other exhibited read problems. They worked fine when connected by way of USB and had worked fine under Leopard. My Firewire hard drives worked OK, although others have had the problem with hard drives as well.
The problem is with a Firewire extension in Snow Leopard IOFirewireSerialBusProtocolTransport.kext

Replacing it with the extension from 10.5 seems to solve the problem. (but does that work w/64bit kernel boots?)
Some people have replaced all five Firewire extensions with those from 10.5. Results have been mixed. For some it is successful, for others the thing that works is replacing only the one extension.

One caveat. Be sure to repair permissions BEFORE restarting. If you don't, for some reason the replacement extension(s) may not be recognized despite repairing permissions after a restart and then restarting again.If this occurs you would have to repeat the entire process.
-Ken"

I haven't seen any issues with 10.6 and Firewire yet but could be helpful for someone.

Power Dongles

I loathe power dongles. Remember when Steve Jobs showed off power-dongle-free Firewire drives at Macworld back in 1999? Well that never really happened.

Btw, he also told us there would be start-stop streaming video and the infamous dual-bus video feed (one camera to two Macs):


Anyways, I saw a simple solution to the typical power dongle vs power strip problem today and thought I'd pass the idea along:

Static Electricity vs Firewire

What does static electricity zapping a Firewire cable look like during a livefeed recording session?

Firewire Tips

Using FireWire 400 peripherals with multimedia applications and FireWire 800 ports has a few basic but still handy tips on using Firewire.

Open Firmware Passwords

Here's a strange one: A friend of mine was editing some multicam footage and suddenly -apparently without reason- it started to severely choke his mac to the point where multicam footage would only play for about 2 seconds before giving up and announcing dropped frames. Literally two seconds.

I tried everything: rebooting, reconnecting his drives, repair disk, repair permissions, all the traditional troubleshooting steps. None worked. Then I tried a safe boot and it didn't take. The mac refused to boot into safe mode, so on a hunch I tried the firmware boot selector by holding down Option when the Mac booted and was prompted for an open firmware password.

So I turned off open firmware password by booting with an OS X install disc and then ran safe mode and zapped the Pram. The choking was gone. Multicam was working again.

So to determine if it was the open firmware password he set recently, I turned it back on and as I suspected multicam choked again.

Now, I'm not sure why but it's 100% consistent. No open firmware password and multicam works. Set an open firmware password and it chokes badly. He's using 4 separate firewire drives for his footage and media files so my only guess at this very strange problem is that somehow when the Mac boots having the firmware locked is preventing something between FCP and the Firewire bus or the drives.

I'm not sure. Any ideas?

Firewire is dead

The new spec will support data transfers at 4.8 gigabits per second, or Gbps, nearly 10 times faster than the current standard's 480 megabits per second and six times faster than FireWire 800. It's also 400 times faster than the 12 Mbps offered by the original spec, USB 1.0.

Firewire is dead.

Faster Firewire Finally

Looks like faster Firewire is on it's way come October. Apparently it's called 1394-2008 and it supports speeds of 1.6 Gigabits/sec and 3.2 Gigabits/sec using the same kind of connector that Firewire 80 now uses and it's all fully backwards compatible.

Firmware update helps Firewire Problems?

Not only did Apple release another pro-app update today updating FCP to 6.0.3 but some sites are reporting that the recent iMac EFI Firmware update helps with Firewire volumes refusing to mount on some iMacs.

Fastest Firewire Yet

Symwave which deals with firewire technology (among other things) announced today the fastest firewire yet.

It's called FirePHY-1600, and increases the speed of regular FireWire to about 1.6 gigabits per second (Gbps) in theory-ish which is twice as fast as FireWire 800.

The cool thing is that it's all backwards compatible with FireWire 800 and 400. And expect people to call it FireWire 1600 any second now. (don't get too comfy as FW3200 is on it's way already)

The true name of this technology is "IEEE 1394b S1600 Physical Layer (PHY)"

They're sending out samples to companies as I type this :)