Firewire drives not showing up on M2 Studio

I was sure I already posted a link to the old discussion that details EXACTLY what Drivers you need to add to get this working in recent macOS, but it is not showing now, so I will post again:

G-RAID Shuttle 4 Does not Work with Mac S… - Apple Community

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marrian1 wrote:

Ok thanks.

I'll have to see if it works to daisy chain a drive with eSata connection to a firewire-only drive.

I don't think that will work.

On drives with multiple interfaces (e.g., USB, FireWire, eSATA), the idea is that you can use ONE of the types of interfaces at a time. The point is to allow connecting to multiple types of computer interfaces, not to offer any support for converting one type of interface to another.

You can daisy-chain some FireWire drives using FireWire, and some Thunderbolt drives using Thunderbolt. In these cases, the drive is simply supporting daisy-chaining that is part of the FireWire or Thunderbolt standard.

How did you format those drives? Using HFS, or HFS+?

Wikipedia claims that

• Starting with Snow Leopard, Apple dropped write support for HFS
• Starting with Catalina, Apple dropped all support for HFS (making HFS volumes unreadable)

There are other threads on these discussion boards talking about how this creates problems for trying to read data from Mac-format CD-ROMs. Apparently, even if you selected hybrid (Mac + PC) format when creating a CD, and modern versions of macOS would be able to read the filesystem intended for PCs, they see the HFS filesystem and then refuse to read the CD at all.

If you have a Firewire drive formatted using HFS (no "+"), the problems you are having with it might be due entirely to lack of support for HFS, rather than to any issue with Firewire.

Thinking about it, the chance of the drives being in HFS (no "+") format is pretty remote.

The OP was using them with a 2019 MacBook Pro. Those originally shipped with Mojave or Catalina, which means that the MBP would not have been able to run a version of macOS old enough to have write support for HFS.

What model is the G-Tech RAID?

What model is the OWC external drive?

Most of those older enclosures had both Firewire and USB connections.

If they have both, then you need to use the USB connection instead of FireWire.

does the enclosure device show up at:

 menu > about this Mac > (System report) > {ThunderBolt, USB, FireWire} anywhere?

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There have been several postings from G-Tech drive owners with issues while using recent MacOS. My recollection is that part of the problem is that MacOS no longer includes the appropriate version of some quasi-system disk drivers, like the Promise drivers.

Those issues were resolved by downloading additional driver software from the G-Tech web site. TWO different driver support packages were required, working together. One replaced the stale version the system carries, one added functions for the specific drive enclosure.

The ThunderBolt-3 <-> ThunderBolt-2 adapter does not pass POWER.

Does everything else have its own power supply?

Hi @direwolf8, were you ever able to get this resolved? Having the same issue...

Good work. :)

Ok thanks.

I'll have to see if it works to daisy chain a drive with eSata connection to a firewire-only drive.