Hello,

Well I work in a facility where more that one person can use an edit system.. and this morning came in and found that on one of our Mac Pro Intel Dual core Xeon sytems, we had trouble using any of the firewire ports.. first it would not see our deck.. I then noticed that none of the firewire drives were showing up.. tried both 400 and 800.. nada, swapped cables.. tried different drives.. no good.. took the cables and drive to another Mac Pro.. and all is well.. Of course i tried several reboots and power up and downs.. but it does not seem to work..,, as far as I know no new software was installed, and we are up to date in our software updates.. one thing I noticed was when I looked at the "about this Mac" pulldown and I clicked on the "firewire" little triangle thing.. it says unknown device...

Any input or ideas would be greatly appreciated..

Thanks !!

Take it to Apple, Firewire ports can and will go bad.

Let them trouble shoot it for you for free.

Agree with Jim. Symptoms match a blown Firewire port. I had that happen and was able to limp along using the FW port on the front. Your mileage may vary.

Hello,

Thanks for the repsonse's.. After much hair pulling, i think I have found the culprit. I found that when connecting a deck (a Sony DSR-1500) using the firewire port, all of my firewire ports would no lonmger work.. If I had an external drive connected to the firewire 800 port or a drive connected to the firewire 400 port..they would "disappear" when connecting the deck..( and yes I did try another firewire cable-same result) what I did was to go in an do a repair on disk permissions and reboot the machine and as long as that deck was not connected, all is well..

Mike M.