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Debugging a panic when plugging in a FireWire drive System
I plugged one of my external Firewire hard drives into my iBook the other night and was greeted with a kernel panic. This is not a good thing, so I did a little work to diagnose the problem. After a couple of tries, the first thing I found was that this particular drive needs to "warm up" before it can be plugged into the computer, unless you want the computer to crash, of course. I thought that was particularly strange since it didn't do that when I first bought it.

Mac OS X, being a Unix system, is usually pretty good about logging an error when something bad happens. A little digging on Apple's website led me to look in /Library/Logs/panic.log. Near the end of a log was a backtrace showing that there was a crash in the com.maxtor.iokit.IOFireWireMxBt module. That looked promising as the drive is a Maxtor OneTouch external drive, and I did install the drivers that came with it.

A quick trip over to /System/Library/Extensions to delete IOFireWireMxBt.kext and MaxtorPowSecDriver.kext, then up to /System/Library to delete Extensions.mkext and Extensions.kextcache, followed by a reboot ... and the problem was solved. Now I can plug my drive in before it's fully warmed up and it works exactly as expected and, most importantly, I didn't lose any data on either the iBook or my external drives.

So, you might be asking, if the drive works as expected, what did those two extensions do? Well, the answer to that is simple. The Maxtor OneTouch drive has a button on it which can trigger programs when it is pushed, like a system backup (Dantz Retrospect Express is included with the drive). At least one of those drivers must have provided that functionality. Another interesting thing to note is that before trashing the extensions, I could not daisy-chain my two drives together, but now I can. I haven't looked for updated drivers, as the drive works perfectly without them and I don't use the button for anything.
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Debugging a panic when plugging in a FireWire drive | 2 comments | Create New Account
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Debugging a panic when plugging in a FireWire drive
Authored by: dfbills on Feb 08, '05 10:44:37PM

Sure doesn't say much about the quality of maxtor software engineering...

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-d



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Debugging a panic when plugging in a FireWire drive
Authored by: gabester on Jun 27, '05 04:57:02PM

I get a kernal panic every time I connect a firewire drive... regardless of whatever system I'm connecting said drive to. It even crashes my diskwarrior and data rescue CDs!

Any hints on how to get at the data on this drive? It spins up after connecting the firewire cable (it's a bus-powered drive) - then the kernel panic screen comes up before the drive even mounts.
g=



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