Open firmware password and firewire enclosure
Tuesday, January 31st, 2006I have a firewire enclosure using Genesys GL-711 chip. It has been working well. However, I tried to mount it under OS X.4.4 earlier today and failed. The System Profile showed the firewire bus but not the hard drive. My powerbook could still mount other external firewire hard drives using different chipsets and the GL711 box could also work with other computer too. I was very puzzled.
I tried to reset PMU and zapped PR ram. I needed to disable the open firmware password to do so. After the zapping PR-ram, resetting PMU, rebooting the computer, the hard drive controlled by GL-711 showed up. I thought it might be a good idea to set the password again, so I did it. Reboot, the powerbook could not see the hard drive anymore. After a few more rebooting and testing, I confirmed that setting open firmware password affected whether the powerbook 12 inch could see the hard drive or not.
This is such strange bug. How would the open firmware password affect the firewire bus? And why it is so specific to one kind of firewire bridging chip but not the others? I guess it would probably not be easy to figure that out.
