Adding Firewire PCMCIA card to Lombard?

Mark: I had the same question, here's what happened to me.

My brother gave me his IBM FireWire PCMCIA (CardBus) card from a PC he no longer uses and I found that the jacks on the card were not the expected size - at least on that particular IBM card. The female jacks were a special slim profile. The card came with special adapter cables with special male plugs on one end and FireWire male plugs on the other end - so there was no place to plug the male iPod cable into. There may be FireWire gender-changer adapters or a special iPod cable for this situation, I haven't looked for them. The CardBus card never did work for ANYTHING with my Lombard but I suspect that was the Lombard - other CardBus cards were also not working in that laptop at that time. (Then I replaced the logic board containing the PCMCIA card cage and got other cards to work fine, but I never tested the Firewire card in that machine.)

Finally:

I tested the FireWire card in my Pismo (today, by coincidence) out of curiosity and it works fine for connecting to my FireWire hard drive. I doubt I'll ever use that card much in the Pismo since the Pismo already has its own FireWire ports.

I can't actually test the Lombard/card/OS X combo for you unfortunately: the HDs got swapped between the two machines and so the Lombard only boots OS 9 at this point. Sorry about that! I hope some of this rambling info has been helpful, anecdotal though it certainly is.

-j

Mark,

You can use the iPod with a FireWire PC card. However, since the FW PC cards do not supply the bus power that built-in FW does, you will not be able to charge the iPod. There is a solution to this issue...buy a FW PC card that has its own little power adapter.

Here is one example that uses a dongle instead of the large, fixed bus port on most new cards. You can shop around for other FireWire PC cards since there is a quite large selection.
http://www.ratocsystems.com/english/products/subpages/cbfw2.html

Also, OSX already has the FW drivers...no software to install.