On a more helpful note, one of the best things I invested in was a Firewire cable. Starting up a Mac in target mode so you can easily access the drive from another has been real useful in the troubleshooting game.
Actually, I do have a need for target mode today! My FW800 which has been flaking out still freezes at times when booting. I found my DW4 disc and ran it, it apparently found and fixed many problems on the 10.4.11 drive. But I want to run Disk Warrior on my OS 9 drive also. I assume that I need DW2.1 to do this, but I only have a hard disk install of this, rather than a CD. So I figured that what I would do is start the FW800 in target mode, then I could run DW2.1 from my TiBook (which is cooperating, for the moment).
I have only used TDM once years ago. Putting the FW800 in target mode is easy - except that my TiBook does not see the drives! Is there something I need to do on the other end to have the drives appear? I tried running drive setup to have it scan all available buses for volumes. Tried starting the TiBook first one time, and starting the FW800 first another time. It's less useful, but I suppose I will try doing the opposite as an exercise, to see if I can use the TiBook as the target disk. I have tried a few known-good firewire cables, I used this one for audio just this week.
Sinking feeling! I had forgotten that I read that FW800 boxes booting OS 9 only have firewire through the FW800 ports, and the FW400 ports no longer work. If that's the case, I am screwed, because I have no FW800 cables. I was assuming that this might be a problem only when booting OS 9, and that the ports would work normally in OS X and other situations. But if this is part of an Open Firmware patch, I might be out of luck. I might be able to put the DW2.1 on a bootable CDRW or something.