Hi i have the same problem as your self, i own a G4 titanium powerbook, Motu 828, Lacie hard drive and a Digital video camera they will not recognise firewire the firewire port powers the hard drive but no data is passed, ie does not recognise the device. i have tried every suggestion going.

i am sure this occured after an OSX update, although Mac seem to be very reluctant to make any comments on this matter.
Have you tried to re install the os to factory, ie go back to 10.1 or 10.2, i have not done this but i think i will give it a go

Regards Dave
parkie68@btinternet.com

I'm in the same boat here. I have an external HD that I haul(ed) back and forth between work. Then I was lucky enough to get a G5, and for troubleshooting reasons wiped the external and installed 10.3 on it. No problems there, until I brought the drive into work, where it didn't show up at all on the eMac I'm using. At that time I was busy and didn't have time to look into it, but since then I've tried it with my older 10.3.8 B&W G3/G4 (upgraded), a friend's TiBook (running 10.2.8), and another 10.3.8 G5 back at school. It worked fine on the G5, but doesn't show up on the others. So I finally started looking into it. Based on what I saw here, I tried connecting a old iomega FW CD burner to my G3. Same thing, the computer doesn't recognize there's a device attached. Just now, I tried connecting the FW HD to my G3 again, then moved it back over to the G5. Now it doesn't show up on that either! It had been working fine for several weeks. I'm wondering if it's possible the device itself is messing with the ports on the computer? 'Cept I just tried the Iomega on the G5 and it works...

I reinstalled 10.3 on the eMac at work (not a clean install though) but that didn't help at all. I'm going to take the Iomega in to work and see if that is recognized too, to verify for certain that it isn't a hardware issue on the dirve.

Tonight I will unplug everything to see if that fixes anything. If not then maybe I'll call up Apple Support and see if they can give me any useful info.

Good luck to everyone else!

CM

Weell... The drive came back on the G5 after a restart last night, the power down didn't work for the G3, and now I'm on the eMac at work looking at my still-invisible external HD. It appears to be just the HD, I tested the Iomega CD burner and it is recognized. The system profiler will show the Firewire bus and device normally when it is plugged in, but when the HD is plugged in it gives me the "no information found" crap. As soon as I disconnect the drive profiler sees the FW ports and Iomega again.

At this point I'm stumped. I've looked into the firmware update possibility, and as far as I can tell it's not an issue - it's a Oxford 911 chipset with the current 3.8 firmware version. Lucky me, because it's an encolsure that was given to me years ago and I have no information on the manufacturer. Will do more research and muck around with things. There's another G4 that I can test tonight too, which might have an earlier version of 10.3 on it. We'll see.

I'm having the same problem with my g4 titanium pb os x 10.3.8.. Although the difference is that my LaCie d2 drive shows up in system profiler as well as in disk utility but still it refuses to mount. I have tried unplugging and permission repairs and tapping the box lightly but nothing happens. The problem seems to be with the drive itself as it won't mount on my other two laptops (ibook 12" and ibook 15") - The fw port seems to be functioninng ok though, I can connect my ipod to my macs and it shows up fine. What to do what to do?

I don't think it's just FireWire - my Yamaha 2010CD rewriter isn't showing up any more since I upgraded to Panther and mine runs off an Adaptec 39160 SCSI PCI card and is 50pin Ultra narrow SCSI. I know it isn't the connection cables because the drive is responding to the computer ie spins at different speeds during the various stages of startup or shutdown. Did anyone find anything to resolve these issues?

I may have identified one cause of the problems with LaCie D2 drives. My LaCie D2 was causing repeated problems like those outlined above. They ranged from not switching on at all to mounting on the desktop but giving the spinning pizza of death when clicked on. Picking the drive up and rotating it caused the disk to stop and restart, occasionally solving the problem. But at other times the disk steadfastly refused to work. My Mac engineer believed that the hard drive itself was faulty, so came in today to replace it. But when he opened the box, we discovered that the two Firewire sockets are not properly connected to the motherboard with solder or anything else. Once the internal workings are removed from the case, the two sockets swing away from the board and rattle about. We have now placed the hard drive into my G4 and it works fine, so this appears to be a quality control error which I will be taking up with my vendor. For the record, my drive is: LaCie D2 HD 250GB DV 8MB 300547 lot 19449B SN 874304020734. I am based in the UK and would be interested to know if anyone else spots this problem. Note that the warranty is void once the case seal is broken, but in the UK this does not affect your statutory rights to secure a refund from the vendor for goods that were not fit for purpose.

speedlimits, you might like to email some of the others whose posts were more relevant to your reply than mine (I don't use a D2 drive or FireWire). It's just that as you replied to me I'm the only one who will have received an automatic email about your post, and the others will probably have stopped looking at it since the last addition was a few months ago.

"no information found" in SP means dead firewire controller chip. Must replace logic board to fix. If it's a powermac you can install a firewire card to replace your lost ports. A card will not allow you to boot the computer into firewire target mode. (in fact if you try, it will probably just shut off a few seconds after it chimes when it realizes it has no built-in firewire ports anymore)