Mac don't see external firewire HD

rodr_oso wrote:

I have a MacBook Pro 13in Mid 2012 and I have connected a external hard drive (Freecom Quattro 3,0 2TB) which has 2 types of firewires to use (9 and 6 pin). I have been using the 6 pin firewire port of the hard drive without problems as the 9 pin port don't recognize it (I don't know why), connected to the firewire port of my Mac.

After some time using it connected as described without problems, now my Mac doesn´t recognize the hard drive. So far I have done the typical, such as rebooting the mac, rebooting the hard drive, replaced the firewire cable, replacing the power cable.. without solving the problem.

Then I connected the hard drive using the USB 3 port available on the hard drive case to the USB port of the Mac, and the Mac recognizes the hard drive without problems, and taking advantage of the fact that The Mac recognizes it, I run the disk utility to check and correct any error. But when I connected the hard drive using the firewire port, the external hard drive is not showing up in the Disk Utility.

Also I did some research and found out about resetting the NVRAM and the SMC, which I did but without solving the problem.

Do you have any idea of what else I can do?

Sounds like the Firewire portion has failed on the enclosure.

I would use what works, or replace the drive if you are determined to use Firewire.

vintage and obsolete:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624

I only know of one remaining source of Firewire drives and enclosures: Other World Computing.

However, you are lucky in that your MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2012) supports both FireWire 800 and USB 3.0. It, and its 15-inch sibling, may be the only two Macs that ever came with both. That means that you are not going to take a huge performance hit by connecting a (Firewire 800 + USB 3.0) drive to a USB port on your Mac.

rodr_oso wrote:

Thanks for your response...

One more, is there a way to check that the problem is not the firewire port?

Plug in a known good firewire device and compare your results.