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I am having trouble getting my MacBook pro to mount an external Firewire hard drive.

I am able to mount the disk no problem on other Macs, just not my machine. I haven't received any errors from my machine, and don't see anything related to the Firewire port in the logs.

Are there good diagnostic tools for this type of problem that come with the Mac? other free alternatives ?

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I'd first suggest checking if anything appears in Disk Utility or if System Profiler recognizes anything being attached. Also, when you say other Macs are mounting the drive are they MacBook Pros as well and are they running the same versions of OS X?

If you have AppleCare you can download TechTool Deluxe and see if it can fix the mount.

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  • The other macs are MacBooks but not Pros and they are running 10.6 while I am stuck on 10.5. I have been unable to find an identical machine to test on. Is there a direct link to download TechTool Deluxe as I could only find upgrades on their site. Did it come as a physical disk in the AppleCare package?
    – dtlussier
    May 14, 2010 at 14:25
  • Sorry to be at this again but I now have TechTool Pro but still cannot test my firewire device as it isn't showing up in any of the TechTool tests/tools.
    – dtlussier
    May 18, 2010 at 19:30
  • Does it show up in System Profiler? On my system (MBP with FW800 drive), I see both the Firewire bus and the hard drive that is connected to it. What do you see?
    – Tim
    Sep 6, 2011 at 14:47
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Fire up SystemProfiler (or system information on lion) for the best diagnostic.

You should at least see the FireWire controller when you connect a good cable to the device. Disk Utility will let you see if the system sees a drive, and the console app will show system errors if there is a cabling issue or timeouts / other FireWire issues and errors.

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