copy to firewire drive error

I am using a new 120 gig firewire Rocstor for backup purposes. The session save copy in function seems to work quite well. However, when I now simply try to drag and drop files from my Mac HD to the firewire drive, the system won't copy the files and tells me there is a disk error. This is not the first time this has happened. Another firewire drive from another manufacturer got about half full with data, then started exhibiting the same type of problem. Another drive even before this I returned because I thought the drive was defective. What in the world is going on here? -John

Hey John, You may want to take a look at Apple's web site....there is a wealth of info about firewire drives there. My only quick-fix for you is to be sure your drives have been formatted with Apple's Disk Utility running under OSX. And for some strange reason, "Zeroing all the Data"(which takes a long time) seems to help for some reason. There are several things that could be the problem but I'd check out the Apple Web site for more info. Hope this helps.

Sorry, been there. You might try updating the Apple F/W drivers to 2.7 or later. This fixed transfer issues with all our F/W drives (like freezes and misc errors). The word from Apple was that the bridge boards in many of these cases were getting incorrectly set by the OS. Hope that helps. Cheers, -Polaris

The firewire driver currently in there appears to be 2.8.5. A tech suggested that I trash the drive and reconnect it, and that worked. Then, later, it didn't. And it hasn't worked since then. The behavior is erratic, but cannot be attributed to a particular cable or drive or port, I've tried different ones. The Apple website has very little to offer. Try a search under "Firewire disk error" or "Firewire cannot be written", and you come up with nothing. I have found Apple's tech support, underneath the tuxedo-like exterior, to be less than stellar, short-lived, and expensive. -John

Hmmm. Jeff and Polaris, I would like to point out that there are several disk formatting utilities on my system. There is the ATTO disk utility for my dual ATTO SCSI setup. And there is FWB toolkit, for my Mtools related SCSI CD drive, which I seldom use. The firewire is usually connected to a Glyph CD burner. I used the drive as plug and play and did not format beforehand. So I'm theorizing that your disk formatting concept is a plausible troubleshooting direction. Any comments? -JCGT

I would also suggest to reformat the drive using the OSX Disk Utility. Make sure "the install OS9 drivers" is checked. Also try this, connect the drive directly to the mac's firewire port rather than daisy chaining it behind the Glyph CD Burner.

One thing I did forget make sure ALL drives are HFS+.

Is there a link to the LATEST Apple firewire drivers....I went to Apple and typed in "download firewire driver" and the latest I could find was 2.5.....thanks.... I've had this freezing problem a lot, especially when copying large amounts of data....I'm on 9.2 on a Dual Gig.