Mounting firewire hard drives

Good evening. After getting my externel hard drive working with the USB 2.0 under slackware 9.1 I just had to make things hard again so I tried using the firewire. After 2 days of trying it's a no go. The firewire is recognized in the info center but when I plug the drive in it isn't noticed. Anyone got some ideas how to achieve this? Thank you.

a little bump and a little progress. I ran
root@darkstar:~# dmesg | grep sd
and received the following error
UMSDOS: msdos_read_super failed, mount aborted.
Does that help narrow the problem any? thank you in advance.