Boot from firewire drive with no BIOS support

[Ken Stailey]

Hi,

I have a FreeAgent GoFlex external drive with the Firewire (IEEE 1394b) module. 
It has ports for USB 2 and Firewire 800. The host has a Texas Instruments 
XIO2213A/B/XIO2221 IEEE-1394b OHCI Controller card in it. There are no other 
hard drives as I have pulled the cables out of the internal SATA drives so it's 
just a CD-ROM drive, some USB ports and and the Firewire drive.

I can plug in the drive via USB 2 and it boots with no problems at all.

I can plug in the drive via Firewire 800 and it will not boot as the BIOS 
doesn't speak Firewire.

I can boot from Ubuntu 11.10 server CD into rescue mode and mount the Firewire 
as chroot but I'm running off an old kernel on the CD-ROM and Upstart is all 
funny that way too.

In that mode "lspci -nvv" reports:

04:00.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Texas Instruments XIO2213A/B/XIO2221 PCI Express to 
PCI Bridge [104c:823e] (rev 01) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0
        Memory at fe9ff000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
        Bus: primary=04, secondary=05, subordinate=05, sec-latency=64
        Memory behind bridge: fea00000-feafffff
        Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 3
        Capabilities: [60] MSI: Enable- Count=1/16 Maskable- 64bit+
        Capabilities: [80] Subsystem: Device [3412:7856]
        Capabilities: [90] Express PCI/PCI-X Bridge, MSI 00
        Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting

05:00.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394) [0c00]: Texas Instruments XIO2213A/B/XIO2221 
IEEE-1394b OHCI Controller [104c:823f] (rev 01) (prog-if 10 [OHCI])
        Subsystem: Device [3412:7856]
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 16
        Memory at feaff800 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2K]
        Memory at feaf8000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
        Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 3
        Kernel driver in use: firewire_ohci

I thought it would be easy to boot from a CD or USB key and switch so that the 
kernel on the Firewire drive would load, instead I find many tools that fail 
trying to do that.

Searching the ieee1394.wiki.kernel.org and using google to search the 
"linux1394-user" archive hasn't turned up anything useful about this yet. 

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Ken