Over the past couple of days, I've been working on upgrading some storage in some devices here in the office. I'm re-purposing some of the replaced drives for other uses, and have been trying to reformat them in the process using a variety of devices - newertech drive dock (via firewire 800), a couple of external OWC 3.5 enclosures (also via FW 800). Seems that just about every combination of drive and enclosure yielded nothing (i.e. generic or no device listed in Disk Utility) or a device that couldn't be formatted for a variety of reasons.

On a whim, I just tested one of the OWC enclosures hooked up via USB to the mac pro and was able to easily format a previously-unformattable drive.

I've restarted several times, power cycled the dock/drive enclosures several times, to no avail. Just now I opened up the Apple System profiler while the dock was switched on a with a drive that wasn't showing up anywhere to find this;

"FireWire Bus:

Warning: Unable to list FireWire devices.
Maximum Speed: Up to 800 Mb/sec"

Is there anything else I can do to reset the system before I give AppleCare a call (luckily we've got the extended warranty for another 2 years)?

motherboard reset. There is a button on the mobo. Plan B is to disconnect power, pull battery, and hit the power On button. Then let it sit for maybe 10 minutes. Put battery back in, plug back in, then power up.

Mac Pro: How to reset the System Management Controller (SMC) [support.apple.com]

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"FUNDIT"

What these last two guys said.

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Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky,
We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.

for the record, my method will work on any tower from B&W G3 on up. PMU,CUDA or SMC. They all get reset with no juice to the board.

I got nothing, just like the verb "borked". What is its etymology? Is it an onomatopoeia (dude, I ate the pizza that'd been in the fridge for a month and borked for an hour) or is its source judicial? How would you conjugate it? I'm going to try and work it into my cab driving lexicon today. "Your mother wears bork!"

did you unplug it from the wall for 15 minutes -- then try again?

not a shutdown or a restart

but a shutdown, unplug from wall, go have lunch, plug back in, retry again kinda thing

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The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs [fakesteve.blogspot.com]

sorry I haven't checked back in. Haven't had time to fully figure this out, but was on the phone at the end of the day yesterday with an "Apple Expert", and wasn't able to pin down the cause.

I need to spend some more time troubleshooting then I'll report back.