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.