News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

January 30, 2006

hardware

Turn away from the light, Firewire

Posted Jan. 30, ’06, 6:20 PM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Hardware

Firewire As I drove away from my townhouse the other evening, I saw a burst of lightning, followed by all the lights in my condo association going out. The lights flickered on a few seconds later and I thought nothing of it. I should have thought more, and gotten a better UPS.

When I returned, my Power Mac G4 was off. No biggie. I started her back up so I could do some work and sync my iPod. Unfortunately, the second half of that plan was a no go. My iPod synced like it was going to, but never went into disk mode. Further inspection confirmed my suspicions. None of my firewire devices worked. Unplugging and replugging had no effect.

Instead, my system log yielded the following.

Jan 30 18:44:12 Gemini kernel[0]: FireWire (OHCI) Apple ID 31 built-in: no valid selfIDs for more than 2 minutes after bus reset.

Terrific. First steps included booting with nothing attached and then attaching things. I tried connecting only the iPod. Next up was zapping the P-RAM and resetting the NVRAM via Open Firmware. No dice. System profiler didn’t even recognize the firewire bus.

Before I reveal what I did to finally fix it, I want all of you with the words “repair permissions” in your brain right now, to cast them out. That doesn’t make sense. That is all.

What finally cured it was shutting it down, disconnecting all the cables, leaving it alone for a half hour, followed by pressing the PMU button, and starting up with the display, mouse, and keyboard only. Most of that was probably completely unnecessary, but I disclose it in case one of them helped. I will believe that it was the PMU reset that did it. If this helps you, I’ve done my duty.


1 Comments

Oliver said:

Interesting. I had an issue 2 years ago with my old G3 iMac and 1st generation iPod. I came back home after 7 months away studying that my iPod had trouble mounting. Sometimes it worked fine, but other times it would get stuck. "Do no disconnect" would display on the iPod's screen, but nothing would happen on the iMac.

Without a 2nd mac or 2nd iPod at my disposal i couldn't be sure where the problem lay, though. What I did discover that once the problem occurred, the only fix was to shut down, remove all cables from the iMac for 30 seconds (and reset the iPod). This procedure would fix it only for a few syncs however - and doing this over and over grew old real quick.

I know now that it was Mac specific - that is, i still have the same iPod but it always works fine with my new powerbook. But I'll never know what the original cause was. Perhaps while i was away the Mac received a bolt of electricity during a storm...

January 31, 2006 12:59 AM

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