[dnanian]

I don't think so, Mike: the boot process via FW and USB is the same from a files-on-the-drive perspective, and CCC is blessing the drive the same way.

On top of that, changing the firmware wouldn't make a difference to the files on the drive, either.

Sounds to me like the drive might have a slightly flaky FireWire implementation -- or there are timing issues involved -- and you're find a correlation that isn't really reliable... but what's wrong there is hard to say. Maybe booting 'verbose' will tell you what's really going on (if software)?