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I have a new mini and a ministack with self-installed Seagate 300 GB drive to which I have cloned the main drive. They are connected via Firewire and selected as such on ministack. About every other time the computer boots, the drive cannot be recognized and mounted. Sometimes the restart helps, sometimes not. If it does mount, there do not seem to be any problems with the drive. However, the mini will kernel panick after a day or two, which it does not do if the drive is not mounted. Also, sometimes the drive cannot be unmounted after it mounts successfully, even though nothing is running and through restarts. My original intention was to use it as a boot drive, but you can imagine what happens if I do that.
Considering that reformatting the drive does not help, what would be the most logical culprit? Mini's firewire or the ministack? Any similar experiences?
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How is the drive jumpered? Sometimes in a single drive/case install, even though the instructions say set to cable select, sometimes setting the drive as master solves the problem. Not sure about S-ATA, or if the ministack is S-ATA, but just an FYI about external cases in general.
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It is set as master, as instructed in ministack manual.
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Try a different cable.
I had a similar problem with my v1 ministack not showing up on a worm reboot about 1 out of 3 times (as a boot drive connected to Quicksilver). Changed the cable (now genuine Apple, the thin white one) and now all is good.
The KP makes me think that the clone is damaged and needs to be redone.
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I think I have already tried different cables, but will check again.
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I have a similar problem with my v2 Stack-- it will *not* mount the HD if I have the switch set to 1394a (FW) when I boot the MDD.
It will mount it if I set the switch to AUTO, or if I power down the Stack for a few seconds after the MDD is booted.
I don't use the AUTO setting as the instruction manual (ha!) says that puts the HD on USB, not FW.
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Different cables do not work.
Interestingly enough, if I disconnect Firewire, the disk mounts through USB, regardless of the position of the switch.
After waking from sleep, the console keeps giving me:
kernel[0]: disk1s3: I/O error
Some signal gets through once in a while, allowing for partial directory listing (strange looking, missing icons).
As long as there are I/O errors, the disk refuses to unmount.
Going to try keeping it on USB next to isolate the problem.
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I wonder if the Firewire chip died on it. Something similar happened to me on an Argosy FW/USB enclosure, as well as two other FW drive enclosures. It's rare, though, that an Oxford chipset would fail.
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USB works fine. Therefore, problems are Firewire-related, either Mini or ministack. I have enough FW drives and other computers around the house to be able to differentiate.
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One other thing to check is that the ATA cable is inserted all the way into the drive. On my first ministack the cable was a very tight fit and I had problems with it until I reseated the internal cable...
Probably not your problem but worth a look...
