IBM R50 18362QU & Fire Wire-Connected Hard Drive

[Peter_S]

I'm mulling over whether to buy the IBM R50 ThinkPad model #18362QU. That particular model has a Fire Wire port (1394), which is important to me since I make image copies of my laptops to an external Fire Wire-connected hard drive (MAXTOR). My question is simple: Is a FireWire-connected device known and accessible to the BIOS? I would like to back up the ThinkPad's Windows XP operating system partition directly to the external FireWire-connected hard drive. The backup imaging process boots out of Windows XP and into a flavor of DOS to create the image. That's why I need to know whether the BIOS "sees" the external hard drive hanging off the FireWire port.

Any help or assistance is much appreciated!