CentOS - Nov 2007 - ieee1394 firewire disk unable to see or mount [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

We have some LaCie 1 TB external disks which work fine on
    other Linux servers (running Red Hat 9, and Ubuntu 7.04),
    but which fail to be seen on our CentOS 4.3 system with
    kernel 2.6.9-34.107.plus.c4smp

The interface card is a Sunix 64 bit Firewire 800 ieee1394b
    adapter plugged into a PCI slot in our Linux server, which
    is a Tyan Thunder K8SD Pro S2882-D, 64 bit AMD Opteron CPU

Using "cat" to examine the "/proc/scsi/scsi" information
shows
    our system hard disk and internal RAID array:

    cat /proc/scsi/scsi
    -------------------
    Attached devices:
    Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
      Vendor: ATA      Model: WDC WD360GD-00FL Rev: 33.0
      Type:   Direct-Access                    ANSI SCSI revision: 05
    Host: scsi4 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
      Vendor: AMCC     Model: 9550SX-8LP DISK  Rev: 3.01
      Type:   Direct-Access                    ANSI SCSI revision: 03

I have found various items in the centos list archives,
    but none of these has provided a definitive solution;
    I have used commands such as "lspci", and "lsmod" to
    ensure that the system sees the firewire card, and has
    iee1394 and other modules loaded:

    lspci | grep 1394
    -----------------
    01:03.0 Firewire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB82AA2 \
        IEEE-1394b Link Layer Controller (rev 01)

    lsmod | egrep '1394|sbp2|s.*_mod'
    ---------------------------------
    sbp2              26825  0 
    ohci1394          36953  0 
    ieee1394         124601  2 sbp2,ohci1394
    sd_mod            19393  7 
    scsi_mod         140561  4 sbp2,3w_9xxx,libata,sd_mod

Somewhere I found a note about trying the "serialize_io=1"
    option with the "sbp2" module, and now have tried that,
    but still have no joy:

    dmesg | grep sbp
    ----------------
    sbp2: $Rev: 1219 $ Ben Collins <bcollins at debian.org>
    sbp2: $Rev: 1219 $ Ben Collins <bcollins at debian.org>
    ieee1394: sbp2: Driver forced to serialize I/O (serialize_io = 1)

The "1394" messages in "dmesg" are:

    dmesg | grep 1394
    -----------------
    ieee1394: Initialized config rom entry `ip1394'
    ohci1394: $Rev: 1223 $ Ben Collins <bcollins at debian.org>
    ohci1394: fw-host0: OHCI-1394 1.1 (PCI): IRQ=[209] \
        MMIO=[fc7fe800-fc7fefff]  Max Packet=[4096]
    ieee1394: Host added: ID:BUS[0-00:1023]  GUID[080028560000470a]
    ieee1394: Error parsing configrom for node 0-01:1023
    ieee1394: The root node is not cycle master capable; \
        selecting a new root node and resetting...
    ieee1394: Error parsing configrom for node 0-00:1023
    ieee1394: Node changed: 0-00:1023 -> 0-01:1023
    ieee1394: Error parsing configrom for node 0-00:1023
    ieee1394: Node changed: 0-01:1023 -> 0-00:1023
    ieee1394: Error parsing configrom for node 0-01:1023
    ieee1394: The root node is not cycle master capable; \
        selecting a new root node and resetting...
    ieee1394: Error parsing configrom for node 0-00:1023
    ieee1394: Error parsing configrom for node 0-01:1023
    ieee1394: The root node is not cycle master capable; \
        selecting a new root node and resetting...
    ieee1394: Error parsing configrom for node 0-00:1023
    ieee1394: Node changed: 0-00:1023 -> 0-01:1023
    ieee1394: Error parsing configrom for node 0-00:1023
    ieee1394: sbp2: Driver forced to serialize I/O (serialize_io = 1)

If anyone can suggest how I might proceed to get our LaCie disks
    to run on the Firewire card under CentOS 4.3,
    I shall be delighted to see what I need to do, thanks

Best regards,

Lawson Hanson
------
Climate Change Group
Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research