Connecting to another mac: not enough firewire ports - are there other options?

[philg]

Hi,
I have quite a particular problem: my mac (a Powerbook G4, 12 in) crashed two weeks ago. It doesn't open up the finder anymore when starting up, so I literally can't do anything with it. Likely, only the software needs to be reset (that's what I was told from two stores, so no debate about that please, for now). Alright. before I can do that, I need to get a lot of files off of there that I haven't backed up yet.
My first try was to connect to my wife's mac (also a PB G4, 12in) with firewire. But my wife can't possibly hold all of them.
So, I got my fairly large, fairly empty external harddrive out. It connects to macs via firewire (and ONLY via firewire). And there was the problem: I already had to use the one firewire port that each PB had in order to connect them both. So there was literally no room for the external harddisk to be connected to my wife's in order to get the data off of my old one and onto the external disk.

Alright: what to do?
My first question would be if there are any cables or tols that can somehow turn one firewire port into two?

And: no, I can't connect my damaged mac to my wife's good one in any other way than firewire, since the finder and the dock don't open up and I can't do filesharing.

Thanks for any suggestions!

 

[spinnerlys]

If the external HDD with Firewire has two Firewire ports, use one Firewire port to connect the HDD to your wife's PB, the other port use for connecting it to your PB and then start your PB in Target Disk Mode.

Firewire is able to daisy chain up to 63 Firewire devices so that should work.

If the HDD does not have two Firewire ports (which seldom is the case though) you might get a Firewire hub or copy in steps.