lacie external hard drive no longer works on mac

[hotgranny]

The external drive was working at my old house, then I moved. When attempting to reconnect, the power cord was plugged into an old outlet, the plugged slipped out, hard drive shut down and then the Mac shut down. now when I try to connect the drive to the mac the mac refuses to even turn on. It is a firewire connection. i have tried both firewire ports on my computer.

However the drive works fine on other macs. this leads me to conclude that the fire wire ports are damaged, or the mac is somehow not allowing itself to be turned on when the external drive is connected. it will also not turn on when just the firewire cord is connected. this is the first time I've used the fire wire connection so please forgive my ignorance.

 

[ObviousTroll]

Wow.

This sounds pretty nasty. Basically, you have one hope left - try a different firewire cable - but the truth is that I think you've fried the firewire chip on the Mac.

It sounds like time for a trip to the repair center...

 

[BabyJeffy]

I also think it's a fried firewire on the Mac. Something similar happened to me on a g4 with a LaCie... took out the firewire on both the hard disk and the laptop.

I would suggest trying to get ahold of another firewire device and try plugging it into the Mac. Basically you are looking to see if the Mac even sees the device. If you can't see the device (and you have tried alternate cables) then I would go for the blown firewire idea.

So... does anyone have an idea if a repair shop would even attempt to repair the firewire? I used to be an Apple Tech in the early 90's and our response (should there have been firewire around then) would probably have been to replace the motherboard. What do you think?

Cheers,
Jeff

[tt]Jeff's Page [/tt][tt]@[/tt][tt] Code Couch

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[chiph]

Given the high level of integration in modern computers, and that the firewire chip is probably a surface-mount device (nearly impossible to unsolder & replace in the field), I would think a new motherboard would be called for. :-(

Hopefully your mac is under warranty or AppleCare. Otherwise, eBay might be the place to look.

Chip H.


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