(Revised May 2008)
Have you ever purchased a new piece of hardware for your Mac and
had difficulty getting it to work correctly? If you have, you can
understand the frustration I felt when I first got a new Western
Digital My Book Premium hard drive and tried to get it to work with
the Firewire 400 connection on my Intel Core 2 Duo Mini. The drive
mounted fine and I had no problems cloning my internal drive to it,
but I had only headaches when I tried to boot the drive. My Mini
and the drive froze on a gray screen with the Apple logo and I
couldn't even boot to my internal drive without shutting down
everything and disconnecting the WD drive.
I had been using the Mini with another external Firewire 400 drive
and I tested it with a third Firewire drive and I had no
difficulties, so I knew the problem was with the WD drive. Next
came hours of searching on the Internet, including on WD's website
and forum, and all I discovered was that many others have had
problems with that WD model and FW. I was ready to return the
drive, but decided to give it one more try.
I tested the drive on USB and it worked fine. I then removed my LG
DVD drive that was connected via USB and again tried the WD drive
with Firewire. Success! Everything worked perfectly. I then
connected the LG to the WD drive via Firewire and again everything
worked perfectly. So, the lesson I learned, and my tip to readers,
is to check for Firewire-USB conflicts when experiencing hardware
problems. Even if a USB device works perfectly with one Firewire
device, it may conflict with a different brand of Firewire device.
When trying new hardware, if you experience problems, disconnect
all USB and Firewire devices except for a keyboard and mouse and
then connect the new item. If it works, you probably have a FW-USB
conflict. Try adding each peripheral device, one at a time, until
you find the conflicting one and you'll save time and eliminate
frustration.
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