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A possible fix for misbehaving FireWire devices System
I bought an iSight camera for my G5 iMac a few months ago and it worked for a while. Until I flashed the firmware that is. It never worked after that. It would sit and you could hear the iris open and close constantly. In the end, it trashed my iChat so badly I had to reinstall iChat.

Move the clock forward to a few weeks ago. I got a new 80GB 2.5 drive in a housing with FireWire and USB. The drive worked off the FireWire bus on my iBook, Mac mini, and the Intel. It refused to spin up on the iMac. Now, how is this related to the iSight failure? It was a clue that the problem was the FireWire bus itself.

I bought a powered Belkin firewire hub for 30 bucks and bingo! The hard drive now worked as it should. It crossed my mind that the iSight draws a fair amount of current, and that this might fix it also. Sure enough, plug the iSight into the powered hub, and it now works just like all it does on all the other Macs. I have a DVD burner (Plextor) that worked, but was sometimes a bit shaky for no apparent reason. It too is rock solid now.

So if you are having FireWire issues, it may be worth 30 bucks to try a powered FireWire hub to see if that "fixes" the issue. What I don't know if this is a problem with many iMacs or just mine, but in reading how many iSight failures there are, I suspect that it is bit more widespread than just my iMac.
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A possible fix for misbehaving FireWire devices
Authored by: greengeek on Apr 17, '06 07:28:20AM

Firewire ports are actually rather fragile. A static discharge, shorted cable, cable plugged in backwards (easier than it sounds) or even just a sharp yank on the cable can damage the port. Most often a hardware failure will result in the actual data interface on the port (or possibly bus) going up in smoke. Had a few ports on a cheap multi-port PCI card fail like this.

The poster's case sounds more like the supplied power from the port was either too low or not present at all.



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A possible fix for misbehaving FireWire devices
Authored by: avramd on Apr 17, '06 11:48:57AM
http://eshop.macsales.com/Tech/index.cfm?Load=FAQ%2Findex.cfm&searchSent=1&searchitem=reset-nvram&searchType=any&submit=GO

Regarding your original firewire problem on your G5, Apples standard troubleshooting mechanism for firewire issues are to reset your nvram. I have zillions of firewire problems on my mini, and this always fixes them (steps below).

Regarding your firewire hub - be careful - adding a firewire hub to my mini actually *caused* lots of new problems - drives conflicitng with each other, devices failint to be recognized, etc.

Steps to reset nvram (from here):

  • Power Down
  • Hold down Cmd-Opt-O-F
  • Power On
  • at Open Firmware prompt, type:
    • reset-nvram
    • reset-all (this just reboots)



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A possible fix for misbehaving FireWire devices
Authored by: jedik on Apr 18, '06 07:02:31AM

Actually there's a line missing in your instructions ("set-defaults"):

-----
Start the computer while holding down the Option-Apple-O-F keys
The Open Firmware screen will appear.
Type in the following:

* reset-nvram
* set-defaults
* reset-all

Your machine will restart automatically.
-----

---
:: Jedi Knight ::
-- Mac Rules! --



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