As I mentioned below your post, I got my pins and speeds mixed up. (See: My Error below.) It is a nine pin, 800, to 4 pin 400 cable. Fortunately for me my Mac still has service time on it and a tier 2 tech got on the phone with me and we went through everything it could be. He finally suggested to me that the issue might be the fire wire, it could be faulty, I did notice that I was having trouble downloading from the camera on the bb, with iMovie 2, a message kept flashing, connected, no connection, connection, no connection. I'd manage to hit the import button when it was flashing connection and it worked. But then it gave me more trouble so I just gave up. Think I will try to test this fire wire on something else to see if that's the issue.
As far as external hard drives, all my backup is on the Time Machine. I had a real bad experience loosing art and music files on an ex-hd that couldn't be retrieved. But I could try a flash drive on the blueberry and see if that works. There is no usb port on the Hitachi.
Thank you for taking an interest in my issue and helping me along. I still have lots and lots to learn. Can anyone ever learn all there is to know about these things? And just when they do, things change again. I'll let you know for sure the outcome...that is if we can figure it out for sure. Oh, Hitachi wrote back to me and suggested "check online for software that may work with it or you can look for a video capture device you can connect the video output on the camcorder to." Since none of the Apple techs I talked to said that "it shouldn't work," I'm still hoping I have the luck of the draw and it will finally work.
Thanks again.