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Redlemon · 10-29-2003, 06:54 AM

Check out Macintouch.com, there have been a bunch of reports where if you don't dismount your firewire drive before shutting down, the contents of the drive get trashed. Doesn't happen to everybody, so you are probably OK. They haven't narrowed down the problem yet.

{added}

MacFixit today has a bit more info...

Quote:

After examining these discussions and reports, it appears that there is more than one issue with FireWire-related drives. Some people are experiencing FireWire drive issues, both minor and major, that seem to be unrelated to this issue. Most of these have been reparable using utilities such as Alsoft's DiskWarrior and/or Apple's Disk Utility.

On the other hand, we have received numerous messages -- and the Apple forum thread referenced above is full of similar posts -- describing a particular situation in which the affected FireWire drive incurs severe directory damage. It will no longer mount or function on any computer, regardless of the operating system (OS 9, Jaguar, Panther, etc.), and Utilities such as DiskWarrior cannot rebuild or salvage the disk's directory. The drive is not even recoverable by installing it internally into a Mac. In most of these cases the only recourse is to use Prosoft's Data Rescue X to attempt to recover files. Reformatting the drive allows it to be used again. One MacFixIt staffer was in fact affected by this issue and lost a FireWire drive.

The constant in this latter group of reports is that the user had installed Panther on an internal drive, and then restarted with FireWire drive(s) connected. The drive(s) worked fine in Panther before the restart; it was only after the restart that the drive became unusable. So far, the issue doesn't seem to be related to manufacturer, drive size, FireWire 400 vs. 800, or how the user installed Panther (clean vs. update vs. archive) -- a wide variety of such configurations have experienced the same problem. Apple is apparently asking users affected by the problem for more details on their systems, including machine model/configuration, peripherals, and the FireWire bridge chipsets used in their FireWire drive enclosures. One reader speculated that the issue may be related to Apple's iSight, which was implicated in FireWire problems soon after its release. However, we haven't confirmed that an iSight was present with all of the reported drive failures (although our system did indeed have an iSight attached at the time). As we get more information about this issue, we'll pass it on immediately.

To be clear, this problem isn't happening to every Panther user with an external FireWire drive. However, until more information on the exact combination of factors that contributes to this issue is discovered, if you have Panther installed on your internal drive, and have one or more external Firewire hard drives connected to your Mac, we recommend unmounting and disconnecting FireWire drives before shutting down or restarting. This may be a hassle, but it seems a prudent course of action to take until Apple is able to identify the precise cause. (It appears as though reconnecting your FireWire drives after startup is safe, as we have no reports of drives being damaged at that time.)