Problem seeing/mounting external firewire hard drives

[Canton <canton@gmail.com>]

Hi there,
First of all THANK YOU to everyone who is maintaining debian PowerPC.
I'm so happy to have my trusty old laptop back in use again.

I've ressurected my Powerbook G3 pismo (actually a G4/500 upgrade) and
it's running 2.6.32-5-powerpc just great... except for mounting
firewire drives. Anyone here who can help?

When I plug in an external firewire drive, I see the following messages:

Jun 26 21:49:14 debian kernel: [20282.231276] firewire_core: giving up
on config rom for node id ffc1
Jun 26 21:49:14 debian kernel: [20282.231307] firewire_core: phy
config: card 0, new root=ffc0, gap_count=5
Jun 26 21:49:14 debian kernel: [20282.239340] firewire_core: phy
config: card 0, new root=ffc0, gap_count=5
Jun 26 21:49:14 debian kernel: [20282.247322] firewire_core: phy
config: card 0, new root=ffc0, gap_count=5
Jun 26 21:49:14 debian kernel: [20282.255363] firewire_core: phy
config: card 0, new root=ffc0, gap_count=5
Jun 26 21:49:14 debian kernel: [20282.263347] firewire_core: phy
config: card 0, new root=ffc0, gap_count=5
Jun 26 21:49:25 debian kernel: [20293.369010] firewire_core: phy
config: card 0, new root=ffc0, gap_count=63

I've tried a number of different drives and firewire cables, tried
drives with different filesystems from HFS+ to FAT... But every time I
get this 'giving up on config rom' error.

Hot-plugging USB drives and DVDs works great -- it's just firewire that's hosed.

Any tips?