- #HAVING TROUBLE WITH LINE IN WITH APPLE MAC G5 COMPUTER INSTALL#
- #HAVING TROUBLE WITH LINE IN WITH APPLE MAC G5 COMPUTER FULL#
Popped in the Leopard disk, clicked to install and rebooted. I carried the computer back to my office, hooked it back up, and booted there. After the backup was done I successfully booted with the USB directly connected to my iMac.
#HAVING TROUBLE WITH LINE IN WITH APPLE MAC G5 COMPUTER FULL#
And here's a salutary tale from a reader who says that merely having a FireWire cable plugged into one port caused his internal disk to vanish while trying to install Leopard:īefore beginning the install, I hooked my iMac to my wife's G5 system in Firewire target mode, and did a full backup to her USB drive, after doing a repair using Disk Utility on her system. Luckily, a Knowledge Base article from Apple told me the cure - turn the computer off and pull the power cord out of the back, and wait a couple of minutes - but that cure is astonishingly similar to recommending that I sprinkle the fairy dust over the machine. On my own machine, I've seen the FireWire ports just stop working altogether. Now, there seems to be little doubt that FireWire can behave quite unpredictably.
Also, this article says, part of the reason that cameras are special is that many of them operate at a special speed (FW100) which can slow down the whole FireWire bus, meaning that if you put a camera on the end of a chain of drives, the drives can misbehave.įurthermore, the same article says that FireWire drive chaining just doesn't work as advertised: "G5s seem to have a problem when they talk to more than 4 FireWire drives." That seems to accord with what Peter is seeing. In other words, your system (including the hard drive you're writing to) have to keep up with the transfer rate it isn't like copying a file from one hard drive to another, where the data just flows at any old speed, but rather is more like burning a CD, where the data supply must keep up with the burning rate (only here it's the other way around, the writing rate must keep up with the data supply).Ī really useful article on this topic describes some of the specifications involved: your target hard drive needs to be fast, to have an 8MB cache, and it needs an Oxford 911 chip for FW400 or an Oxford 922 chip for FW800. Apparently the reason for this is that you're transferring both audio and video and you have to transfer them at speed. According to the 2ndWave site, having any other FireWire devices attached when you're transferring DV can affect the quality of the transfer, and merely turning on a DV camera can stop a FireWire hard disk from working. This seems to show that something about the way things are powered and the way buses are arranged can be quite touchy.ĭigital video cameras (DV), it turns out, are a particularly notorious problem. For example, I've already discovered by experimentation that, on my first-generation iMac, which has no built-in iSight camera, if I attach an external iSight one port on my computer, and there is already an external FireWire hard drive attached to the computer on the other port, the external FireWire hard drive will simply stop working properly (copies of large files will start to fail, for example). In real life, however, it is possible to bang up against various narrower limitations and misbehaviors. In theory, FireWire daisy chains can be very long and FireWire device clusters can be very large the nominal limits are up to 63 devices and up to 16 cable lengths. This is hardly my area of expertise, but all of this got me interested so I did a little checking around on the Internet to see what I could learn. The consensus seems to be that camcorders like to be the only FireWire device on the bus. Now, several people wrote back about the camcorder problem. When I connect a drive to the Firewire 400 port on the front, the first drive on firewire 800 chain unmounts and I get a warning dialogue.Īnd you may recall that earlier we published a note from someone who was getting dropped frames from a DV camcorder when importing from the end of a chain of FireWire devices. When I connect an additional firewire 400 drive to either of these chains everything is fine. Both of these chains are off the back firewire ports. One of the external drive chains has 3 firewire 400 drives on it. I have a G5 2G and five external drives and two internal. We've received a couple of comments about using many FireWire devices at once.
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