[globalcitizen]

Hi, I wanted to get some advice before I take my mac into the store for check up.
I have a MacBook Pro with 10.4

I just discovered that might Firewire Port looks like its broken:

I was planning on digitizing some footage with Final Cut Pro, and when I went to plug in my firewire cable I found the cable did not fit snuggly into the port. Looking at the port, it looks like there could be a potential missing piece at the top left corner. FCP also does not recognize that their is a firewire connection.

Sadly, I was just digitizing something two weeks ago, so somewhere in the inbetween time it looks like the port was damaged.

So my question is:

Is my port permanently damaged? Is this something that if I took into the Mac Store that it could be fixed? or is this something that would take less than a week to replace?

Thanks for you help!
Have a great day!

[CharlesS]

What happened, did you force the connector in backwards or something?

I guess my suggestions would be:

1. If your MacBook Pro is one of the ones that has a FireWire 800 port on it, plug something into it to see if that port works, or if it's fried too. If it's working, you can get a 9-pin to 4-pin cable to connect your camera that way.

2. Get a FireWire card for your ExpressCard slot (and thank your lucky stars that you have a MBP, and not a regular MacBook or an iMac - users of those machines are SOL when something like this happens).

[Waragainstsleep]

If its damaged, your options are as above:
Live with FW800;
Get an Expresscard;
Pay for a new logic board;