Wichita, Kansas-based peripheral maker, WiebeTech is the third company to issue a warning about using FireWire 800 hard drives with Mac OS X Panther since Apple first acknowledged the problem late last night.
“It has been determined that this problem between Panther and FireWire 800 drives usually occurs in circumstances involving older, slower Macintosh computers where the FireWire 800 drive is attached to a FireWire 400 port on the computer, and the firmware level of the FireWire drive is 1.02,” said James Wiebe, CEO of WiebeTech, in a statement.
The firmware distributed by WiebeTech will update the company’s FireWire 800 drives, specifically the Fire800TM desktop drives and MicroGB+800TM pocket drives. The firmware updater is designed to run under OS X, according to WiebeTech.
Wiebe said it is important that the drives first be unmounted from the Panther system, then firmware updated on a Jaguar system (OS X 10.2.8 or lower) before re-attaching the drive to Panther.
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. and Other World Computing issued warnings and download information for customers of their lines of FireWire 800 drives a few hours after Apple first confirmed the growing number of reports.