This post has already been read 5669 times!
Damn Apple and their shoddy upgrades. I heard about people losing Firewire drives with the 10.3.6 update, but I was thinking disk drives… so why did it take over a week to finally put 2 and 2 together and understand why my Retrospect backups were failing… on my external AIT firewire drive? It wasn’t showing up. I plugged it in and out, checked the System Profiler. It reported just a firewire device. Retrospect saw nothing. So i Googled ‘missing firewire drives’ and got a hit on MaxfixIt about the same thing happening to people with 10.3.3. Someone there suggested using an older kernel extension for firewire, IOFirewireFamily.kext and just replace the crap one that Apple released. Luckily, I had done a clean system install about a month ago, where it just replaces your system folder and nothing else, so I had a backup system… The kext in 10.3.6 was 1.8.6, the one I had in the Previous System was 1.8.3. I copied it over and rebooted. And got my external tape drive back. Thanks. Now I have to figure out why this USB multi-format card reader also stopped working with 10.3.6. I’m amazed that Apple lets this out the door.
To replace a kext, it’s best to use a shell. The finder won’t let you copy into that folder. This did it for me:
blinky:~ dillera$ sudo cp -rpf /Volumes/BlinkyClient/Previous\ Systems/Previous\ System\ 1/System/Library/Extensions/IOFireWireFamily.kext /System/Library/Extensions