Problem detecting ext hard drive/firewire in xp

Hi
I have a accomdata 160 GIG firewire hard drive which holds my disk image of my drive before i changed motherboards. i need this to work in the worst way!

I have a new MSI K8N Neo 4 motherboard with an AMD 64 3200 processor.

Now this board didn't come with a firewire port and i had to purchase a pci slot ieee1394 card with 3 firewire ports. Now i have 2 cards one via and one belkin.
The belkin uses the texas instrustments type of ieee1394 controller.
the Via has via OHCI compliant 1394 controller and im using windows xp pro 32bit sp2 with all the nessary updates installed and my bios on the mobo is updated correctly. There are no yellow or red indicators nowhere in site in the device manager.

The problem is that the pci card is comes up but i dont get the "safely remove hardware icon" Nor is the device listed in device manger. i have tried everything from switch mobo's to cable to cards. Pull out the card and removed the drivers for the controller. repeated this process a hundred times and still no luck. i know its not my drive because i sucessful used it to backup my hard drive. This drive is suppose to be plug and play. Its plugged in but its not playing. This drive worked excellent before i upgraded to the AMD 64 processor. Can some1 help me please.