(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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