FireWire Problems

[AndrewHimself]

I have a Toshiba 5005-S504 laptop with built-in FireWire port. I use my FireWire external hard drive to store my files that I don't want to clog down my laptop hard drive with. Unfortunatly, everything was running fine (for the past 1.5 years) until this morning when I got a little error message saying that my "1394 device was unplugged". I checked to make sure that the cable was still plugged in (it was) and then I turned on the external drive. It starts up and my computer says that a 1394 device has been detected but the drive still doesn't show up under My Computer. Please keep in mind that I've had both the drive and the laptop running smoothly for almost 2 years now. I recently installed PhotoShop 7, if that could have any relation. Thanks!!

 

[TruGeek]

Could be a hardware malfunction on either the PC or the drive. I just worked on a laptop that had a similar problem with the ethernet card where it looked fine and dandy on the PC but it wasn't online and the lights weren't on on the card. It even passed all of it's diagnostics in it's little diagnostic program with flying colors. Still didn't work though.

 

[AndrewHimself]

Thanks! I was thinking the same thing. The drive shows up eventually under My Computer after 5 minutes or so. But I can't access it; the system just hangs. Then an error message shows up saying that the drive is not accessible because of an "I/O device error". I really don't think there is a problem with my Firewire card..

I don't think that the actually external hard drive is bad, maybe just the hardware that encases it. Is it common for external drive cases to go bad after a couple years?