Mount un-mountable external Firewire drives
Feb 06, '04 09:58:00AM
Contributed by: avanham
I just replaced the 4200rpm 20 GB drive in my iBook 700 with a new Hitachi Travelstar 7200rpm 60 GB drive using these instructions, and all I can say is WOW! What a difference in makes in speed. My boot time has been cut in half, and for what it is worth as a test, my sudo time find / >/dev/null time dropped from 4:30 to 1:45.
Anyway, I took the 20 GB drive I had removed and stuck it into a 2.5" FireWire/USB enclosure, but could not get it to show up under FireWire (it worked fine as a USB drive). After a lot of trial and error, I figured out how to do it.
- Turn off the iBook
- Unplug the power cord from the iBook (really, this is key)
- Unplug the power cord from the enclosure if there is one -- I recommend you get an enclosure with a power adapter because, at least with USB enclosures, un-powered enclosures can draw too much power and the USB port gets shut down; even the one right on the iBook.
- Now plug the FireWire cable into the computer and enclosure and turn on the iBook, letting it start up on battery power
- The drive will show up on the desktop
- Plug the computer and enclosure power cables back in
This will continue to work even after shutdowns and reboots, as long as the enclosure remains powered (and the iBook will keep it powered if it is plugged in).
I also moved the drive to the front of the FireWire chain, but I am not sure this makes any difference.
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