DSR-11 crashes hard drives

I'm trying to capture footage from my Sony DVCAM DSR-11 deck. The deck is wired via a 400 or 800 (tried both) firewire cable into a LaCie hard drive, then into my iMac. Whenever I plug the DSR-11 deck into any of my hard drives, the hard drives are "shut down." The hard drive icons disappear from my desktop, and I get an error message on the screen saying the drives were not ejected properly. What is happening? I haven't used this deck in a while, but I never had any trouble using it on my old G5.