The Great Escape
by Nate
I nearly lost $60 bucks by clicking the mouse.
So I’m trying to troubleshoot my mac, who seems to have wake from sleep problems occasionally (latest Tiger release 10.4.2). I sort of arbitrarily decide that it must be my firewire drive causing the problem, and I download the Oxford Firmware Flasher here. I dawdle around, open it up. Hmm… it says my drive uses a FW911+ chipset. The only available firmware is for the FW911. Close enough, eh?
I flashed it, and trashed my drive. Didn’t mount or show anywhere except in the Oxford Flasher.
I half-heartedly flung an email to Oxford, the OEM company, asking them for the required firmware file, which cannot be found anywhere online. Yesterday, I received the file in my email and got the drive working again. Incredibly lucky.
Normally an OEM company is not going to provide you with support (I had a generic brand drive).
Lesson: don’t flash your stuff unless you’re sure you have the right files.
August 16th, 2005 at 20:57 CEST
hello Nate,
is your Firewire auto-powered, or powered via the Firewire port.
if you have a PMG5 I will strongly advise you to power your drive via an external PSU.
If the Oxford Firmware Flasher fixed the issue, that’s a good point, maybe we should make a news about it if we can find more cases.
August 16th, 2005 at 22:36 CEST
Whoops, most of the post was cut off.
August 16th, 2005 at 22:42 CEST
It seems I forgot a ” to close my url. The entire blog layout got messed up because of it.
August 24th, 2005 at 19:52 CEST
Nate, I sort of ran into the same boat and flashed my FW911+ board with firmware for the 911. I managed to come across the oxford firmware updater utility with version 1.01 of the firmware, but I had 1.02 before and now my devices are coming up with “Unknown vendor and model”. Any chance you could share that flash file with me? jeff@image-src.com