I am seeing problems with Firewire. Here is what I have:
System - Shuttle XPC SN27P2 which uses the NVIDIA nForce® 570 MCP chipset and lspci says 'FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. IEEE 1394 Host Controller (rev 80)'
Firewire devices - I have a Sony DRX-700UL which can do Firewire400/USB2 and a Maxtor OneTouch III Firewire400/USB2 300GB drive
I use to have the Sony DVD connected via USB but when I bought the Maxtor drive I thought I would move it over to the Firewire connection too. It has always been hit or miss if the Maxtor drive is recognized but as of a few days ago I cannot access it all, it was coming up as /dev/sdb when it was being recognized. I know firewire is working because I can do 'eject /dev/sr1' and the Sony drive will eject and I can also do 'mount -t auto /dev/sr1 /mnt' and read CD/DVDs. When I look at dmesg output I see lots of ieee1394 messages but this one is recurring the most often 'ieee1394: sbp2: aborting sbp2 command'. I see the following modules are loaded sbp2, ohci1394 and ieee1394 is there another module needed? Is the sbp2 module buggy? Do I need the raw1394 module? I have tried many distros including Slackware 12, Slamd64, Arch64, Fedora 8 and currently have 64bit version of OpenSUSE 10.3 installed and all have given me pretty much the same results.

Have you tried going into Control Center - Yast - Hardware - Disk Controller (or whereever it is in OpenSuse 10.3) to set it up?

Saw nothing about Disk Controller but did see 'YaST Control Center - Hardware - Bluetooth, Fingerprint Reader, Graphics Card and Monitor, Hardware Information, Infrared Device, Joystick, Keyboard Layout, Mouse Model, Printer, Scanner, Sound, and TV Card'. So to narrow things down I did a 'rmmod sbp2 ohci1394 ieee1394' then 'dmesg' and reload the modules and checked dmesg again, here is the output:
ohci1394: fw-host0: OHCI-1394 1.0 (PCI): IRQ=[16] MMIO=[fdeff000-fdeff7ff] Max Packet=[2048] IR/IT contexts=[4/8]
ieee1394: Current remote IRM is not 1394a-2000 compliant, resetting...
ieee1394: Node added: ID:BUS[0-00:1023] GUID[080046090008574f]
ieee1394: Error parsing configrom for node 0-01:1023
ieee1394: Host added: ID:BUS[0-02:1023] GUID[00301bbc000020c5]
scsi9 : SBP-2 IEEE-1394
ieee1394: sbp2: Logged into SBP-2 device
ieee1394: sbp2: Node 0-00:1023: Max speed [S400] - Max payload [2048]
scsi 9:0:0:0: CD-ROM SONY DVD RW DRU-700A VY04 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
sr1: scsi3-mmc drive: 40x/40x writer cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray
sr 9:0:0:0: Attached scsi CD-ROM sr1
sr 9:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 5
ieee1394: sbp2: aborting sbp2 command
sr 9:0:0:0: CDB: Read Capacity(10): 25 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
ieee1394: sbp2: aborting sbp2 command
sr 9:0:0:0: CDB: Read TOC/PMA/ATIP: 43 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0c 00
ieee1394: sbp2: aborting sbp2 command
sr 9:0:0:0: CDB: Read Capacity(10): 25 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
ieee1394: sbp2: aborting sbp2 command
sr 9:0:0:0: CDB: Read Capacity(10): 25 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
ieee1394: sbp2: aborting sbp2 command
sr 9:0:0:0: CDB: Read Capacity(10): 25 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
ieee1394: sbp2: aborting sbp2 command
sr 9:0:0:0: CDB: Read Capacity(10): 25 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
ieee1394: sbp2: aborting sbp2 command
sr 9:0:0:0: CDB: Read TOC/PMA/ATIP: 43 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0c 00
ieee1394: sbp2: aborting sbp2 command
sr 9:0:0:0: CDB: Read Capacity(10): 25 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
I'm thinking maybe if I recompile the kernel with Firweire Hard Drive support?