freebsd 5.2.1-RELEASE, 4 pin laptop firewire ports, and 6 pin firewire hard disk drives

[Jesse Guardiani]

Hidetoshi Shimokawa wrote:

> I think you understand correctly and assume your hub has some problem for
> providing bus power. Connect G4 powerbook, thinkpad and 2.5" HDD to
> the hub at the same time and see what happens.

I did that. Nothing happened. I even unmounted the drive from the powerbook.

Interesting things to note:

1.) The hub itself provides ~11.79 Volts across pin 1 and 2 of it's 6 pin
    connectors.

2.) The powerbook seems to provide about the same voltage, despite that
    apple's site specifies 25V DC for their powerbook firewire 400 ports:

    http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Hardware/Developer_Notes/Macintosh_CPUs-G5/PowerMacG5/3Input-Output/chapter_4_section_3.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30000804/TPXREF107

3.) Without the power adapter attached to the hub, not even the powerbook
    can connect to my hdd. Connecting the power adapter to the hub solves
    the problem and the powerbook mounts the hdd automatically.

4.) My friend's dell laptop (the one with the known good 4 pin port) can't
    detect the hdd while the powerbook is plugged in either.


I'm about to give up on the 4 pin firewire port that comes with my laptop.
So, I guess at this point I have these questions:

1.) Has ANYONE on this list actually gotten a firewire hdd (or cd-rom/dvd-rom,
    I suppose) to work with a 4 pin firewire port? If so, what hardware did
    you use?

2.) Does anyone know of a 6 pin firewire cardbus card that works well with
    FreeBSD?

-- 
Jesse Guardiani, Systems Administrator
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