Pismo (G4) Firewire weirdness?

[zarky]

Got a bit of a weird one...
Picked up a firewire enclosure to use with my 3.5" IDE MO drive and it works just fine on my iBook G4. Read/write, mount, copy, eject, whatever.
But when I plug it into the Pismo, It seems to be sending bizarre commands to the drive. It did this with one of my USB-SATA adapters (run with an IDE-SATA adapter), but not with my other one (run with the same IDE-SATA board)

It behaves like this in os9 and Sorbet Leopard, and in the Pismo's firmware boot selector. Again, it works perfectly on my iBook G4 with 10.4. I have booted the pismo over Firewire before using the iBook as a target disk.

Am I missing something here?
Is there some weird external disk firmware bug with the Pismo I need to know about?
It does this with any drive i hook up to the firewire adapter, btw. CDROM, IDE HDD, and this MO drive.

 

[herd]

What firmware version does your Pismo have?

 

[zarky]

What firmware version does your Pismo have?

good question,
upon checking,

ROM revision: $77D-45F6
Boot ROM Version: $0004.18F5
Mac OS ROM file version: 10.2.1

 

[zarky]

Alright, looking at it, this rom may be the problem.
I'm gonna try downgrading to an earlier rom and see how that goes.

 

[zarky]

Dumb Question, perhaps, But how in heck do i downgrade a new world rom?

 

[herd]

Does the external drive have its own power, or are you powering it through the Pismo?

 

[zarky]

has its own power.

 

[zarky]

I may be barking up the wrong tree here with the ROM... Im not sure that's the issue. Boot rom version is 4.1.8 but MAC OS rom version is 10.2.1... I'm not sure either of these things is giving me issue.

I'm so confused as to whats causing this issue.

 

[Byrd]

Try another FW chipset in the external drive - I’m guessing an incompatibility

 

[zarky]

its weird that it would work on my g3 ibook though, but yeah probably just some incompatibility. shame.

 

[Byrd]

Firewire is a great high speed standard of the day compared to USB 1.1; very much like an enhanced version of SCSI but you can see why it was left behind. I've a couple of FW devices that play nicely in later Macs but not all, power and signaling issues are also a consideration.