[Jim Livingston]

This might be helpful: I bought a new Dell computer which does not have a firewire port. Only USB ports. However, my Sony FX1 only has firewire output. The computer would not recognize it with a cable that was firewire to USB. I bought a firewire PCI Express card with 2 firewire ports and it works perfectly. (Siig NN-E20012-S2 FireWire 2-Port PCIe Firewire Adapter, about $45 on EBAY)
I hope this will solve your problem as it did mine.