I’m running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit on my Toshiba A505 Satellite, which has a Firewire port. If I connected my Sony camcorder (DCR-HC40) I would just get either an endless connect/disconnect cycle, or simply nothing at all. Firewire just did not appear to work.
The solution was to roll the IEEE 1394 (“Firewire”) Bus Host Controller driver back to the legacy version. It’s detailed in this Technet post. The important steps are:
Click the Start Button, type devmgmt.msc in the “Start Search” box and press Enter. Expand the “IEEE 1394 Bus Host Controllers” node in the device tree on the right hand pane Right click the host controller node select “Update driver software …” Select “Browse my computer for driver software” Select “let me pick from a list of device driver on my computer …” and Check the box before “Show compatible hardware”. Choose the second option—1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller (Legacy), and click next to update the driver.
