Hardware-reseller Other World Computing (OWC) on Friday issued a firmware updater for its Mercury Elite line of FireWire 800 drives. The updater fixes a problem between FireWire 800 hard drives and Mac OS X Panther, first reported by MacCentral late last night.
“Please make note that this issue has only affected a small number of customers but we take this issue very seriously and highly recommend that all customers either update their drive’s firmware revision or cease using OWC Mercury Elite FireWire 800 drives with Mac OS X 10.3 until the update can be performed,” said a note on the company’s Web site.
OWC Product Manager, Jamie Dresser told MacCentral that the Java-based firmware uploader is available from OWC’s Web site, along with instructions for uploading your Mercury Elite FireWire 800 hard disk.
Apple acknowledged problems between Panther and FireWire 800 hard drives late yesterday, confirming difficulties many users had with Panther since installing the operating system update. Users have reported a range of problems from data loss to not being able to mount the hard in Panther, Jaguar or, in some cases, even Mac OS 9.
LaCie Corp. issued a warning and download information for customers of its line of FireWire 800 drives a few hours after Apple first confirmed the growing number of reports.