CAUTION: EMERGENCY - PANTHER AND FIREWIRE

[dcsos]

Do not connect FIREWIRE DRIVES to PANTHER yet
It eats hard drives sometimes rendering them unusable

http://www.macintouch.com/panfirewire.html

I contacted Maxtor on October 31st asking about the Firewire problems. They said it used a Oxford 911 chipset and wasn't affected by the problems. I shouldn't have believed them.

My Ti400 crashed sometime overnight after running a full backup in Retrospect to the Firewire drive. I Rebooted without thinking about disconnecting the drives. It screwed up all three volumes, I couldn't even erase them in Diskutility. I had to repartition before I could use the drive.

[jamerican]

FWIW, I am using 3 FW400 HD's, 1 FW400 DVD-ROM, 1 FW400 CDR/RW and a FW400 scanner with Panther, and so far I have had zero problems. I have all of these connected to my Mac with an OWC FW400 PCI card, and am in the process of adding another HD to this setup. I also boot from 2 of the FW HD's , one with Jaguar and one with a clean install of Panther. My internal drive was a straight upgrade from Jaguar to Panther, also with zero problems.
Guess I'll just keep my fingers crossed for the time being.

[galactica]

Agreed.
I dont konw if that was a situation specific thing, i even installed panther on an external firewire drive for testing purposes before installing on my internal drives.

[dcsos]

I was under the impression the issue with FireWire drives had been resolved. IT HAS NOT

Look Here for information this about OS10.3 only (PANTHER)

http://discussions.info.apple.com/WebX?7@42.aeBgal9Ik8K.114562@.599b4a59/643

[Percy Dovetonsils]

I was under the impression that the problem was only with Firewire 800 drives not firewire 400 ones.

[dcsos]

Some users are reporing problems with the OXFORD 911 chipset and PANTHER 10.3... Neither Macintosh or Oxford will confirm this.. but MACINTOUCH has several hundred posts from PANTHER adopters who fried either 800 or 400 drives when connected to the g5

The official workaround (tho' not 100% safe) is to alway boot and shut down with the drives dissconnected
The reason why its not 100% safe is what happen if you crash while operating with the drives still connected..This is where the DATA CORRUTION and DRIVE UNUSABILITY come in

ALSO..the moderator says never use NORTON for MAC as

First off Norton most certainly could have been one of the causes of the problem. It corrupts directories more frequently than not:

http://discussions.info.apple.com/WebX?13@24.TWYBaaO9mj1.2@.59992f6d