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[Astroman]

as mentioned elsewhere the MacBook is usable, but crippled significantly.
Most significant: the machine runs at 500 MHZ - fan barely noticable which is cool if speed isn't the ultimate goal.
2nd screen supports 1920x1200 in million colors, really nice display on Eizo CG243W.
Ethernet works reliable if the the router port is set to 100/half duplex (doesn't negotiate).

Never mind, it's just an intro, so here's the main (and puzzling) point:
all started from the usual OSX setup from which the Alu Book literally went on a continous downward path loosing features during OS transition.

It was setup as a FireWire destination, then FW was gone.
During the initial OS-9 phase both USB ports were active, now the left one is gone, too.

My (humble) suspect: OSX has a (whatever) way to setup the firmware appropriately.
Digging deeper into OF wouldn't be too difficult (I know the language's basics), but I'd rather avoid it for too many languages already competing in my head.
Unfortunately I didn't partition the drive to keep OSX - but now will do and add it to the 2nd.
Maybe there's way to capture the firmware state or is this all reset from an OS-9 boot anyway ?
Can't imagine the latter because then all OF hack entries would be in vain, too (imho)
I'ver read the respective thread about OS-9 boot details a couple of times ... and will do it again... and again.

[DieHard]

This is very interesting, I will reload OSX on my Aluminum 17" 1 Ghz and report if it too now suffers from the "OS 9" curse...

On your 15", do a PRAM rest (wait for 3 chimes) and re-install off CD/DVD; I can get you images to make CDs/DVDs if you need them, or probably available on the garden, let me know if that does the trick

[Astroman]

thanks for the offer, but I have all required disks.
The OSX PowerBook DVD 10.2 did the installation and brought all ports back.
An USB-2 4port device worked in the PCMCIA slot and a Netgear WLan adapter blinked.
A LaCie disk connected to the FW800 port worked, too.

For the sake of a common base I used your 'Universal 9.22' for OS9, but exchanged the ROM and it booted (after removing the multi-processor plugin).
I did no power cycle and kept the FW800 connected and it was recognized in OS-9.
(didn't check the exact data rate, as FW400 would be reasonably fast anyway)
Network kept it's settings without manual intervention at an obviously higher data rate.
(System Profiler instists on 10mbit half duplex, but the transfer is way faster than USB, so I consider this a false figure)
But PC-card and the left USB port refused to work in OS9 just as before.

No real clues yet, but there seems to be some influence between the 2 operating systems.
First reboot into OS9 requires to capture boot selection via option key - after that it keeps the OS9 boot disk (obvious as OSX ignores OS9 in this installation)