I got a WD 1TB My Book with eSATA/USB/Firewire400 connectivity to backup data on a client Centos 5.1 machine.

USB 2.0 works fine out of the box but is rather slow, Nautilus predicts about 1+ hour to fully backup just one day's worth of data or about 100GB.

So I was hoping Firewire would be faster, which is why we got the version with all 3 interfaces to experiment with first.

Following the suggestions given to another user here http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=15767&forum=37

I updated the system's kernel to the CentoPlus 
[noob@localhost ~]$ uname -s -r
Linux 2.6.18-92.1.10.el5

After a reboot, everything appears to work as expected, with the motherboard's TI Firewire controller detected
[root@localhost ~]# lspci | grep 1394
04:07.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB23 IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller (PHY/Link)

However, now I'm stuck as the system does not appear to detect the drive when I connect the firewire cable and turn it on.
I've followed some of the suggestions to check the drive status like
"fdisk -l" but this only shows the drives already installed in the system
"tail -f /var/log/dmesg" shows no new messages when the drive is connected/powered on

So I'm at a loss as to what else I should be doing to get Firewire to work and will appreciate any help on this.

Thanks!