James M. Burke

After having the issues with my previous laptop (and working for a storage company), I decided to get a USB 2.0 external hard drive to (regularly) backup all of my data. I chose a Maxtor USB 2.0 drive and it seemed to work fine for a few days, but I quickly ran into some issues. The MacBook Pro wouldn’t even mount the drive. I thought it was just the drive, so I went to the local CompUSA and bought a USB 2.0 enclosure and a Samsung 300GB drive. I had the exact same problem. When I did a ‘cat /var/log/system.log’, I could see various messages similar to this one:

May 16 23:16:14 XXX kernel[0]: USBF: 12462. 59 AppleUSBEHCI[0x36e2000]::DoIOTransfer – error 0xe000404f queueing request

I have filed a bug with Apple (#4550783) and they are currently investigating the ‘ioreg -l -w0′ output. If I switch and use a Firewire compatible enclosure, everything works great. Has anyone else had problems with this? I’ve heard this has been an ongoing issue, not anything specific to the MacBook Pro.

Lately, I’ve been trying to post more about technology than personal matters, but I can’t leave this announcement out. On May 29, I got engaged to Rebecca — I finally popped the question after over five and a half years of dating….and guess what? She said yes. Rebecca has been there for me through all of life’s ups and downs. I owe a lot to her, and am truly blessed to have such a loving and wonderful person as my fiancee.