Help! Firewire problem!

Question

I just bought a clamshell ibook on e-bay. I like these machines very much (they're tough and quirky), and in fact I have one already as a second machine, but the one thing I really missed was Firewire.
I went for collection in person, as it wasn't too far away. The previous owner is a nice lady who kept the machine in lovely condition. She'd never used the Firewire at all. While she had it, she'd run Jaguar on it, but had put OS 9 back on it to sell.
I plugged in the DVD drive and put a CD in it. It powered up and ejected its tray when required, but nothing appeared in the Finder (which appears to be all muddled up with the Desktop; I don't think I take to OS9). I tried the portable hard drive (which has a boot system of Tiger in it). The boot loader (boot and press Option) didn't seem to see it, and it didn't appear on the desktop.
On the other hand, nothing reported an error. I ran Apple Hardware Test. It reported no problems. Does the 'logic board' check test the IO as well? More to the point, I looked at the hardware profile, which reported a Firewire device present.
I guessed it seemed more like a driver problem than anything else, so I bought the machine (nervously). It's a lovely little machine, very clean and pretty, I only hope it isn't a lemon...
I had some vague assumption that some sort of System Extension might need to be loaded, but apparently the Firewire one is loaded.
I'd expect filing system/mass storage to work between OS9 and X, because 9 and X both support mass storage (otherwise all those flash drives wouldn't mention 'OS 9 and up' on the packaging) and use Mac OS Extended.
Things power up. The hardware test and system profiler report firewire devices, but nothing appears on the desktop, and the Disk-Utility-type things don't mention the firewire devices.
If it's a problem with the things I want to use being bus-powered that's infuriating. The DVD drive doesn't even have a power-supply, and the tiny hard drive has one somewhere which I've mislaid. I wanted something where I could just dig out the device I wanted to use and attach it, without fuss or extra power bricks or cables. I'd normally assume that there's enough bus power for one device at a time on the system's main port, though, just like USB.
The Help, isn't (starting from the vital point that things will appear on the desktop, and not being forthcoming about what happens when they don't). It did mention powering up the device when it was connected, which is why I started wondering about self-powered external devices.
Sigh. Macs Just Work. Except when they Just Don't.
I don't really intend to use OS9, but I feel I ought to make sure the firewire works before I even think about putting OS X on it.
Regards, Ruth

Answer 1

Replying to my own question in case this bites anybody else in the bum.
The problem was, as I suspected, that OS 9 needs more drivers than OS X does. This is murkified by the point that there is ****-all help about this available in OS 9 Mac Help, which does its best to suggest 'plug it in and it will mount', which suggests it has Mass Storage in the same way that OS X does. This isn't necessarily the case. In OS 9.0.4, which is what this clamshell came with out of the box, it needed drivers for any drives added, even fairly straightforward things like optical drives or (HFS+) hard drives.
Unfortunately, most of the help I could find did not clarify this, and when I mounted the drive I was trying to test on the USB port, OS 9.0.4 (a.k.a. 'junkware excuse for an OS, it's as bad as Windows 95, really it is') told me the drive wasn't formatted and did I want to initialise it, which wasn't what I wanted to hear, especially since I knew it was HFS+ formatted and had a Panther clone from the other clamshell on it.
I tried to run the firmware updater, but it told me it needed at least OS 9.1. At this point I was really tearing my hair out, but luckily a helpful gentleman from my local user group pointed out that Apple supplies an upgrade to 9.1 on the Web, presumably as legacyware for people trying to get OSX onto OSX-supporting OS9 machines.
The helpful gentleman said, upgrade to 9.1, upgrade the firmware, upgrade to 9.2 and you should probably be able to see your externals from that point.
I downloaded it, booted the problem clamshell from its install CD, ran the 9.1 upgrade and the firmware upgrade
(also downloaded from the web) without any problems, and to my surprise discovered that either 9.1 or the firmware upgrade had fixed the problem: I could now mount the DVD-Rom drive and the external HD on Firewire without any problems.
The boot loader on the Option key didn't seem to add the new firewire disc to the list of bootable discs; OTOH selecting it as a startup disc now worked.
Since the machine cloned-from was also a clamshell so I wasn't going to have any major compatibility problems (the only differences were bigger hard drive, more memory, and firewire), I booted from the external and checked everything worked, wiped the internal, and cloned from the external boot disc with Carbon Copy Cloner, then removed the external so it would boot from panther on the internal.
This worked as expected. I'm not sure why I had so many problems with the boot loader (holding down the option key at boot only seemed to show the internal disc), but I've now got a better clamshell with firewire, so if my mac mini breaks I can attach its hard drive (Firewire) to the clamshell, and I can use the clamshell to check my backup DVDs away from home, and I can attach the Topfield hard drive recorder under the telly to the clamshell's USB and spool programmes off it onto the firewire drive which has more space. So I've now got the things I wanted firewire for, and a better clamshell.
The helpful gentleman told me Mac OS 9.0 has far more in common with 8.6 than OS X, and the reason it can't see modern Mass Storage drives is that they came along since Mac OS 9 itself, and were only supported in 9.1. 9.1 actually does have more in common with OS X.
Regards, Ruth