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I always lug around a firewire 400 cable with me and my white MacBook.
Recently I connected my MacBook with said cable to a 1.5yr old MacBook Pro, and that machine's port died, and later on the entire logic board started going berserk. I assumed the faulty logic board was the problem to begin with.
Today I connected the MacBook to a white intel iMac 17", and now both the iMac's and my MacBook's firewire ports are dead.
Here's what is consistent throughout all borked machines:
- Target disk mode boots, but disk does not appear on a good machine with a good cable
- Connected peripherals don't work, disks do not show up on disk utility
- In system profiler, all information that is shown is "FireWire Bus: Maximum Speed: 400…"
- On occasion, it'll also show, in red, "Unable to list FireWire devices."
This is all the trouble I've ever had with FireWire, and the only things in common to all situations is the cable I used, and the white MacBook. Since the MacBook came away unscathed from the first situation, and FireWire worked fine on it up to today, I'm inclined to blame the cable.
So, can a FireWire cable fry the port(s) that it connects to?
Well this is really really bad, because at least with Apple machines, a fried port means a logic board replacement, and when out of warranty, you're SOL. – kch – 2009-07-31T03:00:42.700
Which begs the question, why aren't there self-frying cables, that would fuse before the voltage could damage the machine at the end of it. – kch – 2009-07-31T03:01:56.270
The powers that be make more money off of replacement machines than self-frying cables. – LawrenceC – 2012-08-16T19:39:49.710