Connect two HDs via Firewire?

The standard questions:


Are you daisychaining them or are they plugged into two different firewire ports? How many drives do you have inside the Mac? (I'm not sure how many fw ports are on the dual G4.)


Which exact drive models are they? Which enclosures? And how do you have the jumpers positioned on the drives?


Are both enclosures plugged in or bus-powered? Are both formatted as Mac OS X extended?


When you have both attached, and go into About this Mac > More info > Firewire, do both show up and if so, what firmware is noted for each drive?


What does Disk utility show when both are connected? Restart with both attached, then look in Disk utility again, what shows up?


And when you say you have 10.4.6 "installed" on one of the external drives--do you mean you have a bootable backup of your dual G4 on that drive?

See my answers in CAPS below your questions... and thanks very much for responding!!!

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My guess is you've given enough info that a real computer pro would know exactly what you should do next. Since I'm not one, I'll just tell you what I'd do next if I were you: so both enclosures are formatted properly, show up on your desktop when they're each connected individually to either of your firewire ports, they work, i.e. you can move files to them, all the cables are good, they show up in Disk utility, you can mount and unmount them (when they are the only drive attached) and you've verified and repaired them via Disk utility as well.


Next I'd try to better isolate where the problem might be--is the incompatibility caused by your Mac, the chipset/firmware of your enclosures, or something unique about the combination of those two drives.


First, it's easiest if you try connecting them to another Mac--what happens when you daisychain them on your new Mac mini instead? Same scenario--both will mount individually but neither will daisychain successfully? (I might be mistaken, you do have a mini, right?) I'd do this even before trying to mess with resetting the firewire bus, PRAM, NVRAM, PMU on your Mac.


Next thing I'd do is swap another hard drive into the Plumax 3.5" enclosure--then try to daisychain. (You might not have another one lying around or that you could pull out of another enclosure.)


Next I'd try to daisychain with a different firewire device like an external dvd drive (which had two firewire ports) that I knew worked. Change the order up so those two Plumax cases were not next to each other. (You might not have another one.)


Next, if I didn't have a second Mac to test, and lived near an Apple store, I'd take the two enclosures in and ask if you could plug them into one of their Macs and see if they mount on the desktop.

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Excellent! I don't know why, but I guess I'm too concerned that my G4 might be dying so I wasn't being methodical and developing a plan of action. I sure am glad there's this forum for helping bring things into perspective! BTW: I wasn't aware that one could reset the firewire bus... or that the Apple Store would even think of letting me connect up my external drives to one of their computers.


I do have a new mini. I was hoping to use these external drives for transferring ripped-DVDs from my G4 to the mini. I also have a "spare" IDE drive, an external CD-burner/DVD drive and will try out your suggestions.


Thanks for you time and help. I'll be doing the testing later today and I'll let you know what transpires...