Disappearing FireWire drives

[Tom Baker]

This is a G-4 733 running 10.3.5, with three external FireWire drives 
chained together and plugged into one of the Mac's FW ports. The drives 
keep randomly disappearing from the desktop. Sometimes none of them 
show up on startup, while at other times I might see one, or two. To 
get the missing one(s) back all I have to do is unplug and replug the 
cables that chain the drives together, or else the one plugged into the 
Mac (it IS all right to plug and unplug FireWire cables live, isn't 
it?), but how come I have to do that?

Messing around with the cables always gets the drives to show up on the 
desktop again eventually, so it's more of a nuisance than a serious 
problem, but why is this happening? How can I make all three drives 
show up and stay put all the time? When I go back and forth between 
OS-X and OS-9, which I do several times a day, I can never be sure the 
external FireWire drives will be there after each restart, and there's 
always the fear that one or more may NOT come back sometime, and all 
the data on it might be lost.

Anybody got any idea what the heck is going on here?
Tom
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