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

[Hidetoshi Shimokawa]

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.

/\ Hidetoshi Shimokawa
\/  simokawa at sat.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp
PGP public key: http://www.sat.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~simokawa/pgp.html

At Sat, 20 Mar 2004 13:39:30 -0500,
Jesse Guardiani wrote:
> 
> Howdy list,
> 
> I bought an external 2.5" firewire enclosure back in Dec 2003 to use
> with my IBM Thinkpad A30p's 4 pin firewire port. At that time I didn't
> know much about firewire, so I totally neglected to notice that the hdd
> uses a 6 pin port and is a bus powered device. But my laptop has a 4 pin
> port, so I can't directly connect my laptop to my external fw hdd because
> the 4 pin port doesn't provide bus power.
> 
> So I reluctantly used the USB 1.1 port on my laptop with the external
> hdd for a few months. It was painfully slow, but at least I could still
> USE the drive to some extent. Eventually I found a decent deal on a 4
> port Belkin firewire hub, part number F5U524. It comes with a power
> adapter and provides bus power, so I figured this would be an excellent
> way to power my hdd AND still use the 4 pin port on my laptop.
> 
> However, apparently I'm missunderstanding something about the firewire
> specification because even with the belkin hub I can't detect or talk to
> my firewire hdd under FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE *OR* Windows XP Professional.
> I've tried connecting to the hdd through the hub from three different
> laptops:
> 
> 1.) My Thinkpad with a 4 pin port (FreeBSD & WinXP)
> 2.) A dell with a 4 pin port (WinXP)
> 3.) A G4 Powerbook with a 6 pin port (OS X)
> 
> *ONLY* the Powerbook can actually detect and talk to my HDD via firewire.
> I've tried a 4 pin to 6 pin adapter *AND* a 4 pin to 6 pin cable. No joy.
> 
> Anyway, the hub is obviously working because the Powerbook can connect to
> the HDD through it. The dell has a known good 4 pin port. My friend has used
> it in the past to send DV streams to his camera. But I really don't know
> if my Thinkpad's 4 pin port works or not. I've never been able to make it
> work. Here's the dmesg:
> 
> fwohci0: vendor=1180, dev=522
> fwohci0: <1394 Open Host Controller Interface> mem 0xc0201000-0xc02017ff irq 9 at device 0.2 on pci2
> fwohci0: OHCI version 1.0 (ROM=0)
> fwohci0: No. of Isochronous channel is 4.
> fwohci0: EUI64 00:06:1b:02:01:00:24:63
> fwohci0: Phy 1394a available S400, 2 ports.
> fwohci0: Link S400, max_rec 2048 bytes.
> firewire0: <IEEE1394(FireWire) bus> on fwohci0
> fwe0: <Ethernet over FireWire> on firewire0
> if_fwe0: Fake Ethernet address: 02:06:1b:00:24:63
> sbp0: <SBP-2/SCSI over FireWire> on firewire0
> fwohci0: Initiate bus reset
> fwohci0: BUS reset
> fwohci0: node_id=0xc800ffc0, gen=1, CYCLEMASTER mode
> firewire0: 1 nodes, maxhop <= 0, cable IRM = 0 (me)
> firewire0: bus manager 0 (me)
> 
> I've tried 'fwcontrol -r' and numerous other commands, but nothing happens
> (well, the bus resets, but my HDD isn't detected). 'fwcontrol -t' always
> returns the same result, regardless of whether the hub is attached to my
> 4 pin port or not:
> 
> [13:34]jesse at trevarthan:[~]# fwcontrol -t
> crc_len: 3 generation:7 node_count:1 sid_count:1
> id link gap_cnt speed delay cIRM power port0 port1 port2 ini more
> 00    1       8  S400     0    1    0W     -     -         1    0
> 
> Can anyone tell me why I can't connect to my HDD through a powered firewire
> hub using the 4 pin port on a laptop?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> -- 
> Jesse Guardiani, Systems Administrator
> WingNET Internet Services,
> P.O. Box 2605 // Cleveland, TN 37320-2605
> 423-559-LINK (v)  423-559-5145 (f)
> http://www.wingnet.net
> 
> 
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