[MacDoc]

I've seen a bit myself and there are number of reports of problems with corrupted directories and drives failing to mount so use some care with external drives if they have critical data.
Likely stripping a drive and configuring it under Panther is safest.
Our experience with Panther shows a very correlation with performance and stability and running somthing like Onyx DAILY. Yep that's right every day.

Doing that makes it very very stable - NOT doing it leads to lost printers and drives and other odd behaviours.
The journaling aspect may be part of the Firewire issues.
People with feedback on this aspect should keep this thread rolling forward or I can change the name to Panther issues - let me know.

Note that currently Disc Warrior does not work completely with Panther.
Suggest upon mounting a Firewire drive run disc utility - this app has some improvements including burning - worth exploring.

 

[imactheknife]

I just installed panther on a external firewire HD and all is good....booted from it and works great...then I installed panther on my Main drive after I saw that there is no major flaws and all is good...no corruption on my external drive but then again I only use it once in awile so who knows what may happen later....but so far works awesome! Mark

 

[kps]

David, what exactly are you saying? If you have journaling turned on, external firewire drives will get corrupted? How badly and can they be recovered. Data loss?

Can you point us to those reports? thks.

 

[MacDoc]

I'm not sure - there seems some fragility in the handling of Firewire volumes - so it's a general caution until we know more.

 

[dibenga]

macdoc becomes George Dubia all of a sudden....

"This is a general alert...."


Just kidding MacDoc... Much apprecieate the heads up althought a bit vague

 

[MacDoc]

Yeah wish it wasn't - reports are scattered and it's hard to know if it's older chipsets affected.
FW drives need regular attention anyway so doing a quick maintainence on them will do no harm.
We get far too many drives in to be repaired and that's 9 and Jag both with directory issues from lack of maintenance or dismounting incorrectly.
As with any major release there are odd issues popping up but anything involving potential data loss is serious enough to warrant a caution.

 

[kps]

Keep us posted!

Presently, I have two firewire drives chained to my G4 desktop running 10.2.8. I've had zero issues with this setup. Panther is on my shopping list, so this is a concern.

So, what is the recomended "maintenance" process? Running DiskUtility that came with Panther? You mentioned DiskWarrior may not fully work with Panther at this time. I wouldn't want to reformat my FW drives, if you know what I mean.

 

[(( p g ))]

I posted some notes on a related issue (journaling in Panther).
Here's the link FYI.

 

[Kosh]

http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2003/10/30/firewireissue/

Apple apparently has found out what the problem is and working with Oxford Semiconductors to fix the problem.

Whatever you do, don't use a Firewire 800 HD with Panther right now.

Looks like Macdoc was on the right track.

 

[gmark2000]

I have a Western Digital 120Gb Firewire (400) drive. Is this suceptible to this damage??

 

[PosterBoy]

Macdoc may have been on track with the firewire thing, but this part is a little silly:

Our experience with Panther shows a very correlation with performance and stability and running something like Onyx DAILY. Yep that's right every day.

I am convinced that this is a placebo effect. Certainly many of the tasks can give your system (or seem to give it) some extra snap (repair permissions, update_prebindings for example) but none of them (save possibly the daily cron script) will do much if you run them every day.

Unless of course you are installing and uninstalling multiple applications every day.

--PB

 

[MacDoc]

Well the system peformance especially with mail and web is noticeably improved which are likely cache issues.
If I let it go a couple of days it wants to drop printers and sometimes the Filemaker network connection which I've heard from others dropping connections.
The RAID makes any slow down or pickup easily perceptible.

We see so many drives in with damaged directories and permissions that anything that is easy and effective is worthwhile doing daily. It's not like it takes a lot of work.

 

[PosterBoy]

I am sure that once printer manufacturers update their drivers and software manufacturers update their apps for Panther a lot of those issues will disappear. Especially the latter.

--PB

 

[MacDoc]

Yes I agree but right now here is a bit of lack of robustness in the connections that maintenance seems to alleviate.

 

[Kosh]

double post

 

[Kosh]

gmark2000, it seems to be specific to Firewire 800 drives only. Still, you may want to check out the website of Western Digital and watch for any firmware updates. So far the following companies have issued warnings and/or firmware updates:

LaCie

OWC

Wiebtech

 

[MacDoc]

Many clients bringing in systems have never maintained them and repairing permissions can run to hundreds of lines.
I just don't see why it's even an issue for discussion - it takes a few minutes - the tools are there - run it daily - big deal.

 

[PosterBoy]

By damaged permissions, how much are you talking about? Is it repairing a line or two each time or are there tens of lines?

--PB

 

[MaxPower]

I've been experiencing problems with my Smartdisk FireLite running Panther on a Dual 867 MDD. When copying files it stalls, refuses to unmount etc.

The files are coming from a 17" FP iMac.

I thought at first it was the drive, but after reading this thread I can clearly see that it is a Panther issue.

I am going to back up my drive and reformat. I'll see if that helps.

 

[PosterBoy]

I just don't see why it's even an issue for discussion - it takes a few minutes - the tools are there - run it daily - big deal.

I only keep talking about it because the way you have been talking about it you give the impression that you have to run it every day to keep OS X running fast and smooth when that just isn't the case.

--PB