Mac Mini :: What Is The Best Device To Give It More Firewire Ports
Apr 5, 2012
I'm wanting to connect my DV Camera and an External Firewire HDD to my mini. I really only need two firewire ports: one for the camera and one to daisychain any further Firewire HDD. This is all in aid of being able to digitize HD Tape footage with the mini using FCP so I can do all the editing etc of the Mac Pro. I've found a few online such as:The Belkin Firewire 6 Port Hub, Belkin Hi-Speed USB 2.0 and Firewire 6 Port Hub and the 1Lynx 800 Advanced Firewire Hub (99MO018202).The stackable Belkins look great
3 times in the last week, my 400 & 800 firewire ports are not working. I am using a firewire hub with several external drives. I unplug everything, reboot and then they work. anyone know what is going on?
Both my firewire ports are not working. No signal or connection with external hard drive or video camera. Firewire does not appear under Network Status and is grayed out under Network Port Configurations.
Just wondering why does apple supply firewire ports on all their comps including laptops, because these days I can't find anything that has firewire ports that I will use everyday i.e. flash disc, HD, mouse etc. I know there's somewhere a 2.5" HD firewire case available but I already have a USB case for an external, and it would probably be more expensive to get it. What do you guys use firewire ports for?
I have a 15" MBP and am now having trouble discovering my printer on it. I have the printer connected to my iomega powered hard drive which in turn connects to my MBP via firewire 800. Earlier the printer was working fine when the iomega was connected via a USB port. BUt im short on USB ports (one goes to my Companion 5 speakers and the second to a 2nd display besides the mini DVI display) hence need to connect via firewire.
About to take the plunge and buy my first laptop (currently have a G5 PPC imac.) I'm planning on using Logic 9, Garageband and Sibelius, and recording live instruments. It will be my main computer, and will be moved about a fair bit. I'm going for a Macbook Pro since Apple decided to remove the Firewire ports from the Macbooks. Any thoughts on minimum spec? I can't decide whether to go for 13" or 15" - and would appreciate any ideas on what extras are really worth the additional cash (I haven't got an unlimited budget.)
I am not a huge Mac guy, but have to use them at work? Our Mac Pro lacks enough firewire ports for the configuration I need to do. So I guess I need to get a firewire 800 card and it will only be used in conjunction with out AJA unit (HD video production), so if it has one or four ports it doesn't really matter. Anyone have a brand or specific card they prefer?
I've been thinking about getting a Harddrive Dock. I had a Seagate External USB 2.0 drive but in windows, I didn't get more than 40MB/s which is slow. The Macbook Pro's have Firewire 800 which I think is significantly faster than USB 2.0. I also found some HD docks with firewire ports. So, what kind of speeds can I expect with firewire ports? On another note, I wish the macbook pro had an esata port!
I have a new iMac and an older MacBook. I wanna transfer about 70 gigs of info to the macbook from the iMac. Only problem is the iMac has a newer firewire port and the macbook has an older firewire port. Transferring wirelessly through aim will take way too long. Can I connect through the ethernet ports or maybe usb ports?
My powermac G5 has been off for a week while I was moving apartments. When I plugged it in again the external harddrives (four in all) that were daisy chained through the two firewire ports aren't being recognized anymore. I thought it was a bad cord or insufficient power but nothing worked. When I finally got around to looking at the System Profiler and check Firewire it said, "Unable to list firewire devices". I admit that I'm at a loss and I have no idea how to troubleshoot this.
If I connect my Western Digital 500 GB external hard drive up to a computer using the USB port, then can I daisy chain a firewire camcorder to the hard drive and use it with the computer? Or is that impossible?
I hate the fact that the Macbooks don't have firewire, other then the white one. or the Pros.
My front firewire 400 and 800 ports abruptly quit working. THe backs work fine. I've tried two different video cameras and an external hard drive and according to system profiler none are recognized and none are accessible.
I have a 2006 Mac Pro and recently my firewire ports stopped working (front and back). I did a little searching around found a suggestion to try resetting the Mac's PRAM and NVRAM by holding the Cmd-Option-P-R keys down while booting. I have tried this numerous times and it doesn't seem to do anything (i.e. the Mac just loads OS X and doesn't re-boot like the instructions say). I'm using a MS Wireless Comfort Keyboard for Mac. Can you reset using a wireless keyboard?
Since I wasn't making any progress with that, I was toying with bringing in the Mac to a genius bar. Never having used the genius bar before - how does it work? Do I bring the computer in and leave it with them? Do they work on it while I'm there? I don't have an extended warranty so do they charge time and materials? I'm wondering if that might get awfully expensive and if I ought to just buy a PCI-X firewire card instead.
I have a 2006 Mac Pro and recently my firewire ports stopped working (front and back). I did a little searching around found a suggestion to try resetting the Mac's PRAM and NVRAM by holding the Cmd-Option-P-R keys down while booting. I have tried this numerous times and it doesn't seem to do anything (i.e. the Mac just loads OS X and doesn't re-boot like the instructions say). I'm using a MS Wireless Comfort Keyboard for Mac. Can you reset using a wireless keyboard?
Since I wasn't making any progress with that, I was toying with bringing in the Mac to a genius bar. Never having used the genius bar before - how does it work? Do I bring the computer in and leave it with them? Do they work on it while I'm there? I don't have an extended warranty so do they charge time and materials? I'm wondering if that might get awfully expensive and if I ought to just buy a PCI-X firewire card instead.
I've attached my external drive to my 17 inch macbook Pro, on the wirewire 400 port, and it shows up under the profiler as as "Unknown device". The same drive looks fine on my iMAC OS version on both machines is 10.5.2. If I use the USB2.0 port on the drive and connect it to either machine it can be seen by both.
I recently had to take my mac mini to pieces to upgrade its RAM to 2GB. I initially had problems with booting up - it would get to the white screen with the apple logo and think for about 2 minutes then restart and repeat the process indefinitely. I managed to fix this by removing the clock battery for a while. I also zapped the PRAM after installing. But now, the strange problem is that OS X wont boot up (it will get to the white screen, think, then restart) if my firewire devices are connected. In case this helps, I have two HDDs and a DVD burner connected in daisychain to the firewire port. It definitely boots up fine with any other peripherals/connections. Once OS X has booted successfully, I can then connect my Firewire devices which seem to work fine.
I have tested my new RAM with memtest and rember and everything seems fine. After upgrading my RAM, I would also get two alerts on start up - "Do you want the application "configd" to accept incoming network connections" and "Do you want the application "mdnsresponder" to accept incoming network connections ". I have fixed this problem with the help of this post: [URL]. Aside from the horrible idea that I have damaged some hardware, does anyone have any clues as to how I can mend this? A wise colleague of mine said that if it was a windows machine, he would look at the BIOS settings as he thinks my computer is trying to boot from one of the HDDs, and that I should try to find a list of boot drives and remove the firewire HDDs if they're on it. I know macs don't run BIOS, but is there anything similar I could check?
I'm attempting to upgrade a family member 800mhz iBook G3 from 10.2 to 10.4 using my old iPod as the install drive. (Restored a DMG, etc) Only problem is that (other than being an ancient computer, I guess) is that said iBook doesn't see the iPod until after OSX loads (white spinny guy).
Tried holding Alt at bootup (not listed), setting it as the default boot device (just skips it and goes right to the HD), and just running it from OSX (reboots, straight back to OSX desktop).
Is there something I'm missing? Does this model G3 not allow detecting boot devices at start up? I'm kind of at a brick wall here. Should I just bite the bullet and do a target disk install?
Does this mean that an external hard drive with firewire 800 will be no good to me? Or does mean that the last firewire device was only capable of 400 mb/sec?
I have an old 828 audio interface I've been using for years on my pc. just switched to mac with dual intel macmini running os x 10.4
I went to MOTU's website and downloaded os x drivers, and installed them... but I still can't get the computer to see the device. Profile or whatever shows the firewire ... yet device doesn't show up
Is there nothing like scan for devices on that port I can do in os x?
'08 Mac pro kernal panics every time i turn on my firewire recording interface, an echo audiofire 12. the strange thing is, it runs fine if i turn the interface on before booting the computer.
Windows 7 has been awesome so far, but there are still the occasional driver issues. What I'm having trouble with now is firewire. I used to use HFS Explorer to access my external (HFS formatted) hard drive but it no longer shows up in HFS Explorer. Windows doesn't even make the "device connected" sound when I turn it on (yes I'm running HFS Explorer in admin mode/Vista compatibility). Pretty sure it's a firewire driver issue, but I have no clue who makes the firewire for my early 08 MBP.
Yesterday I took delivery of the following kit- http://www.dolphinmusic.co.uk/produc...firewire-.html
As you can see, it comes with the FCA202 Audio interface - http://www.dolphinmusic.co.uk/produc...io-fca202.html
I opted for the FireWire package as it has the most better quality mics. I got it all hooked up, but for some reason, my Mac is not recognising my new sound device at all. I was looking under the Sound part of the Control Panel, but nothing new would register. I checked the FireWire part of the Device Manager (appologies I forget the actual name of the application). The Firewire device was listed as "Unknown", if I was to remove the device and refresh, it would show nothing. So i've got the feeling that its been seen, just not recognised correctly.
I tried a few things to try and help my situation.
1) Disconnecting any other attached device 2) Rebooting several times 3) Leaving system off and unplugged for 10-15 mins 4) Updating all software 5) Resetting my xxxx (I forget the term, but it involved rebooting holding CMD, Option, R and P) - can someone confirm how I know if this was actually reset? 6) Going into Activity Manager and confirming the Audio driver is loaded
From what I've read, Firewire config issues can be common with Macs. I am running an 18 month olf iMac 20" with 4 gig ram. I've not used my FireWire port for a while, about 6 months ago I used a FW external HD which didn't have any problems with. Alas I don't have any other FW devices to plug in and test the port. The final thing I'm going for is to leave the system unplugged for 10 hours, which will be ready to check after work.
One thing I was thinking about though - would getting a powered FW hub be of use at all?
One day I couldnt wake my macbook from sleep with my firewire WD Mybook 500G connected, so I power off the macbook manually and start it up again. It then triggered kernel panic, and i found that my macbook resume normal if i do not connect the firewire external HD. I performed PRAM reset and even PMU reset but it still couldnt help.
BSD process name corresponding to current thread: WDMemeod
Mac OS version: 9G55
Kernel version: Darwin Kernel Version 9.6.0: Mon Nov 24 17:37:00 PST 2008; root:xnu-1228.9.59~1/RELEASE_I386 System model name: MacBook2,1 (Mac-F4208CAA)
I connected MacMini to my TV/Monitor with HDMI cable. Now I want option to listen to audio through my stereo too so I connected a stereo mini plug to the audio output on tegh MACMINI and to stereo miniplug input on my receiver but do not get sound.
