I bought an iBook 14-in 600MHz locally. (Be warned that this anecdotal intro. may having nothing to do with the main matter.) The seller stated that the Li-Ion batt. had been kaput for two years. Sure 'nuff, the battery toiled not, neither did it spin. Backup battery was also feeling poorly. (So would you after two years in a cupboard.)

The iBook started up from its AC adapter, but kept freezing at the menu-bar with a snivel about wrong date and time. No big deal. Get hold of it in target disk mode from my wife's eMac 1GHz and give it the thrice-over.

Rescue of the iBook was straightforward, and ended with complete wipe-oh of the stock 20GB HDD (>85% filled with former owner's files, which I archived in case she wanted them), partitioned into nominal 2GB (OS 9.2.2) and 18GB (OS 10.3.9 fully updated as far as SecUpdate 2007-007). Natch, this to-ing and fro-ing included much plugging and unplugging of FireWire and ethernet, but always with both Macs and the LaCie d2 external HDD quiescent at the time. The only bugbear in the process was DiskWarrior's observation that the iBook was so RAM-deficient (stock 256MB) that it would take longer than usual for its work.

Now the story gets interstin' and to the point. Next evening was Retrospect time for the eMac, but it didn't see the target LaCie as it had done weekly for the last year. Testing cleared the cables and the d2 of fault. Oh, oh! Flied FireWire ports, anyone? Very tasty when they are part of the logic board. Sheesh. Last night I used USB instead of FireWire for the backup. Max. transfer rate was <40MB/min (instead of up to 600 normally with FireWire), and I stopped the process at 5hr. Thinks. What if the death of the FireWire ports is 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 ago. eMac saw and mounted the d2 LaCie's three volumes.

So the question is, what software restoration to the main 10.3.9 partition can restore its FireWire functionality? Any ideas, please?

de
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(60x) 13DT + 3PB + PTPro; (G3) 7DT/MT; (G4) 3T + PB. System 8.1 to OS 10.5.8

That is very strange.

Have you had any luck since then?

You might try removing the kext caches. rm /System/Library/*kext*

Note that OS X will then take a lot longer to boot as it rebuilds the kextcache on the first reboot. I should also say that I'm grasping at straws. I'm much more familiar with OS 9 than OS X.

Peace,
Drew
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Power to the PowerPC!

When last I looked, the sole responder to this question over at Apple's Discussions had volunteered the suggestion of an archive and re-install. Obvious enough, but conributing little to my comprehension of the matter, as I observed.

I'm by no means as familiar with the innards of OS X as I am with those of OS 9 and its forebears, so I appreciate any identification of potentially responsible/corrupted kexts and the like. It's nearly 25 years since Unix was a daily concern of mine, and even then it was mostly to program in PostScript on top of it. Rather like Logo in many ways, but rather more sophisticated. But I digress. My innate and learnt preferences are to understand the event, its causes and outcomes, but it's my wife's eMac and she is up to her earballs in a literature survey at the moment. I shall boot into and back-up from the serviceable partition for her weekly backup until I dare to dispossess her of her machine long enough to try your suggestion.

de
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(60x) 13DT + 3PB + PTPro; (G3) 7DT/MT; (G4) 3T + PB. System 8.1 to OS 10.5.8

Looking at the list in the Extensions window of ASP in 10.3.9, I see five obvious kexts (IOFireWire ...). A Mac with a currently attached external FireWire HDD shows (only) IOFireWireFamily as 'loaded'. In the same circumstances, the eMac shows none of the five as loaded. The strange extension (NPI) of that is that the eMac can still boot from a bootable partition on the external LaCie d2 despite that none of the LaCie's three volumes shows as mounted on the desktop. Muses: is the problem merely 'cosmetic' rather than functional?

Where is Alice when we need her?

de
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(60x) 13DT + 3PB + PTPro; (G3) 7DT/MT; (G4) 3T + PB. System 8.1 to OS 10.5.8