MBP Firewire -> Audio Int -> Hard drive woes??

[benulous]

Okay, need some advice...or maybe one of you have run into this...

 

I have a Macbook Pro Intel 2.2ghz running Logic 8.0.2 on OSX10.4.11. I then have an M-Audio FW410 and a 320gig 7200rpm external firewire drive. Up till last night, I ran my firewire cable directly to the FW410 and then from the FW410 to my External Drive. I mainly stay in the midi/softsynth domain in Logic and will only use my ext. drive for some sound libraries and for the audio I do use.

 

Last night, I it all went haywire. When I reboot, it would work for a little while, but the ext drive would suddenly disappear from my desktop and I'd get a 'disk ejected improperly' [or something along those lines]. Then, the drive would come back up suddenly, but the FW410 would disappear and not be able to be used. Like they were fighting for who could be seen. Then, I started to copy some of my more important files over to my local drive..and then sometimes I would get that cursed mac spinning ball thing and things would pretty much freaze up [like the Finder was no longer responding].

 

I've been using this setup for months w/out a hiccup. I ran disk utility and techtool on my local drive and my external drive and it all came back successfully [like nothing was wrong].

 

I'm worried that my MBP Firewire port has gotten fried somehow. Have any of you run into this? If daisy chaining is not the best solution, how can I get these two firewire interfaces usable? Any advice or suggestions are welcome.

[triplets]

M-Audio drivers baby! They're crap, M-Audio interfaces don't like to share the firewire bus. I always had trouble with it. Happy MOTU user now.

[benulous]

well, I've had it like this for almost a year without any issues...I did just upgrade the drivers about a month ago and it actually turned out more stable. But, i certainly wouldn't be surprised if M-audio was the culprit...in fact, i hope it is.