Dead FireWire on a G4?

[Mike Richardson]

Has FireWire been known to give out on a G4 AGP Graphics?

I hooked up my FireWire DVD drive as I always do to install the OS, but on this particular G4 it doesn't work. The drive is just fine.

If the FireWire is bad is there any way to fix it, or is the board scrap?

 

[wood_e]

I've read reports of dead FW ports on xlr8yourmac.com - the fix has been to get a FW PCI card then all is well.

 

[Christopher]

Did you try the internal one as well?

 

[Franklinstein]

From what I've gleaned from teh intarwebz over the past week looking for potential fixes for my dead PBG4, it seems that FireWire failure was pretty common on at least the early PowerBook G4 line. On the Powerbook, it's something to do with lack of ESD protection and having the FireWire power and bus power being one and the same.

On the B&W G3, the primary FireWire setup was located on a little module that attached to the logic board. The module contained the ports, fuses, etc, while the logic board was home to the controller chip. I'm pretty sure that one or two of the early G4 models were the same. If yours is, then you can just try swapping the FW module. Otherwise, see if there are any fuses (there should be) or visibly damaged devices.

 

[Rodus]

I think that the only G4 which shared the seperate Firewire board with the yosemite was the yikes. As far as I know, all sawtooth mobo's had the firewire fully integrated.

 

[Mike Richardson]

I tried all three ports including the internal. In the OS 9 system profiler, it does not show any devices, just a few bits of gibberish like "g45dv, 7hd5h" for the bus and some other gibberish for the device when it's plugged in. In a correctly working system it would show LaCie DVD-RW.

The FireWire stuff is not on it's own board since it's an AGP model.

This machine has other problems - the power supply fan makes a grinding noise (probably fixable), and the DVD-RAM drive makes a terrible noise and scratches discs that you insert (probably not fixable).

I'll check for fuses, but there appears to be power to the FireWire ports.

Assuming no other problems, a FireWire PCI card will work, but it needs to be bootable.

 

[Rodus]

Have you tried an OS X install with a fully functional internal optical drive? I've had the occasional glitch on my OS 9 sawtooth with firewire that otherwise runs fine under X.

 

[Mike Richardson]

Have you tried an OS X install with a fully functional internal optical drive? I've had the occasional glitch on my OS 9 sawtooth with firewire that otherwise runs fine under X.

Well, I tried rebooting while holding the C key with the OS disc in the FireWire drive. All other G4s boot right up off of the disc while this one blissfully ignores it. I reset PRAM, and also tried holding Option. Instead of showing me the icons that you pick from to boot, it just stayed at a black screen.

I have another Tiger G4 I can try the hard drive from, but my guess is that it's bad FireWire.

 

[wally]

All three rectangular metal self resetting fuses F1 F2 F3 should measure about +26.5V on both ends, also SMT cap C40 at the + end. You can also inspect T1 T2 T3 to make sure no one busted any of the eight tiny wires by over cleaning with a brush, same for the two tiny wires of L11.

 

[equill]

A while back I was attempting to clean up a newly-bought 'not working' iBook G3/600 in target disk mode from an eMac. It was a successful exercise, but the next night, when Retrospect time came along, the eMac would not 'see' (on the desktop or in ASP) an external LaCie d2 backup HDD on either FireWire port. Testing by substitution cleared the cables and the d2 of fault. Uh-oh ...

Then a thought: what if the death of the FireWire ports was software- rather than hardware-related? I booted the eMac from a second 10.3.9 partition of its 80GB HDD, which I blessed myself for having had the forethought to create when I set up the eMac a year before. eMac then saw and mounted the d2 LaCie's three volumes. The d2 was also able to boot the eMac from its 10.3.9 partition.

The copious references returned by a Google search with 'FireWire port failure' were inconclusive and unilluminating. They mentioned PRAM-zapping, and they assigned much blame to supposedly shoddy construction of ports and cables without citing meaningful specifics. I found plenty about PHY (and fi, fo, fum also), but this fault did not appear to lie in the hardware. I also do not use any but first-quality short shielded cables. I never did find out convincingly about core system services that could be implicated in the failure of FireWire ports, but a complete archive of apps and documents, followed by reinstallation and re-update of Panther on the affected volume, solved the problem. Of the five IOFireWire ... extensions visible in ASP one was conspicuously inactive before and active after the reinstallation, but whaffor I still dunno.

de