Dual 1.8 G5 Firewire toast

Hi all,

I hope this is the right place... Someone pointed me here for another issue I'll address in a seperate post and it seems like there's much more knowledge than other "have you repaired permissions?" forums.

I have a dual 1.8 G5 that besides having the annoying power supply "chirp" noise has an issue with the onboard Firewire. One day after not using anything Firewire for a few months I went to plug in my DV camera and it wasn't recognized. Nor was a hard drive in a FW enclosure. Looking at System Profiler, the Firewire pane was just empty. Did a PRAM reset, booted to a clean install on another partition, nada. Hardware test CD dumps core when hitting the Firewire stuff. Machine no longer sleeps as it's likely trying to do something with the FW ports before going to sleep.

On boot, there's this message:

Jan 11 22:43:34 localhost kernel: FWOHCI Error trying to clear PHY ports.

Lots of talk on Apple's boards about dead FW ports. A new logic board doesn't make financial sense on this machine unless I could get one cheap.

I recently put a cheap IOGear FW card in and it works. However now instead of just showing nothing under Firewire in SystemProfiler, it crashes, as does the cli version (system_profiler) with a "bus error". In turn, that causes CrashReporter to crash as well since it calls system_profiler to get info on the machine. Whee!

Now the questions:

-Any chance of finding a cheap logic board? Ideally I'd like to sell this thing off and just go to an intel iMac. I can't sell it in it's current state.
-Is there any chance of "fixing" the onboard FW? Or anyone that does work on logic boards?
-Is there any way in OpenFirmware to fully disable the onboard Firewire?

The last one would be a good fix for me. If the OS never saw the broken onboard Firewire, I bet the machine would sleep again. It may also fix the system profiler crash, who knows. In the past I've had trouble finding good docs on OF. Perhaps there's an OF guru here?

Thanks!

Charles

ps - nice forum software!