"Firewire not supported" and Ipod frozen

Same problem ("Firewire not supported" freeze); took almost a whole day to find fix. Here's what I did:
1)I plugged another USB device into the port to make suree it worked. It did.
2) I tried another Ipod cable to make sure it wasn't a cable problem. Still no fix.
3) I plugged the Ipod into a different computer which had USB ports on the rear of the machine. Bingo! Ipod came back to life. I found several posts stating that front mounted USB ports tend to be squirrely and offer less power than rear ones.
4) I was now able to place the Ipod into disk mode and verify that the files were intact and there was no damage to the drive (scandisk).
5) I rebooted out of disk mode and started I-tunes on computer #2 and the Ipod was recognized. On the healthy USB port it began to charge normally and several hours later has a full charge and is back to normalcy.
6) I reattached Ipod to original computer, front USB port, and the Ipod was also recognized on this computer. Can't explain why it happened, but please try this and see if it's a fix that works for this issue consistently.