iMac G3, OS9 not booting after OSX install

[Project Alice]

Hi all, recently picked up a red 400mhz iMac G3 slot loading, for 10$! A steal if you look the prices up on eBay right now.
Anyways, I'm perfectly familiar with this mac and PPC Macs in general.
I bought a Sata to IDE adapter, threw in a 150gb 10,000rpm sata drive I had lying around. Partitioned to 128gb as per this macs limit.

Anyways, I booted the universal 9.2.2 CD and installed os 9. Booted up and worked perfectly afterwords.
Now the iMac only has a CD drive so I used my G5 in target disk mode to install Mac OS X. 10.4.11, tiger.
Tiger is now installed, updated and works great. Classic mode under OSX works great.
Start up disk in system prefs shows both system folders. I select the 9.2.2 folder and restart. After about 40 seconds I get the mouse and the floppy with a ? Mark. I rebooted holding option, the drive shows up with the old classic finder logo. I select it, and I get the same thing. Reboot again pressing 'X' and I'm back into tiger. I'd rather not reinstall OS 9 as the only 9.2 disc I have is software restore so it erases the whole drive.

 

[LightBulbFun]

there is an option in the universal image. not to erase the Drive. IIRC.

you can also mount the .img inside the ISO and copy over the OS 9 install from the mounted image to the destination drive.

I have install OS 9 quite a few times like this

 

[Project Alice]

I'll try that. I have no idea why it would stop booting in the first place.. It's been quite a few years since I've screwed around with OS9 so I am a bit out of practice.

 

[AphoticD]

Hi all, recently picked up a red 400mhz iMac G3 slot loading, for 10$! A steal if you look the prices up on eBay right now.
Anyways, I'm perfectly familiar with this mac and PPC Macs in general.
I bought a Sata to IDE adapter, threw in a 150gb 10,000rpm sata drive I had lying around. Partitioned to 128gb as per this macs limit.

Anyways, I booted the universal 9.2.2 CD and installed os 9. Booted up and worked perfectly afterwords.
Now the iMac only has a CD drive so I used my G5 in target disk mode to install Mac OS X. 10.4.11, tiger.
Tiger is now installed, updated and works great. Classic mode under OSX works great.
Start up disk in system prefs shows both system folders. I select the 9.2.2 folder and restart. After about 40 seconds I get the mouse and the floppy with a ? Mark. I rebooted holding option, the drive shows up with the old classic finder logo. I select it, and I get the same thing. Reboot again pressing 'X' and I'm back into tiger. I'd rather not reinstall OS 9 as the only 9.2 disc I have is software restore so it erases the whole drive.

Not sure if this is relevant, but when you formatted / partitioned the 128GB volume did you select the "Install Mac OS 9 Drivers" option? (Was that even an option in Disk Utility on Tiger?)
[doublepost=1519987312][/doublepost]To confirm, here are two screenshots of the output of 'diskutil list', which shows the partition map of the attached volumes.

Here is a partition map from a Sawtooth G4, with "Mac OS 9" drivers installed. It actually boots OS 8.6 + OS X Server 1.2v3, but regardless, you can see a series of "Apple_Driver" entries, which are the "OS9" bootloader partitions.

Here's the partition map of the boot volume on a G5, which doesn't have the "Mac OS 9 Driver" partitions.

 

[Project Alice]

Yes, the disk was partitioned in tiger and "install Mac OS 9 Drivers was checked". I had OS9 installed before I installed 10.4, so OS 9 was booting prior to the install Mac OS X on the same partition.

 

[Project Alice]

Heres an Update:

I tried to boot from the Mac OS 9 install CD, and it did the same thing! It seems for whatever reason after installing tiger this machine has became incapable of booting OS9. I got a different CD, a 9.1 installer and it got the floppy and question mark as well. In all my years of working on PPC macs ive never seen this. Its a summer 2000 iMac DV 400 with the CD-ROM drive, which came with 9.0 apparently. Theres absolutely no reason this should not be working.

I seem to be having the same problem that the the user "spudnuty" had on their imac. Scroll down a little bit and you see he solved it by booting the original imac install disc. I dont have the original disc. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1565466


Another update:

the iMac can boot my iBook G3s mac os 9 system folder. The iBook can also boot the iMacs OS 9 folder. So the iMac will not boot mac os 9 off any of the internal drives. I'm even more dumbfounded.

 

[AphoticD]

It sounds mysterious. Did you try a PRAM reset?

I would try reformatting to start again and split the drive with two partitions, one for OS9 and one for Tiger.

 

[LightBulbFun]

what firmware is your iMac on?

its a good idea to make sure the firmware on your iMac G3 is fully up to date first

http://mrjcd.com/iMac_firmware_update_4.1.9/

a firmware update can resolve many issues (However im not sure if it will resolve yours or not)

 

[Project Alice]

The firmware is already updated to that. My thought was to try to do 2 different partitions for each one, but being as the thing won't boot an os9 CD. I figure I might be in the same situation. I may just stay with tiger for now. I think it might have something to do with the drive being larger than 128 Gb.

 

[AphoticD]

If you disconnect the HDD, does the iMac boot from the OS 9 CD?

Another thing to consider; Did the slot loading iMac 400 have the 8gb boot volume limitation? This might be the cause of the weirdness. Try repartitioning with this in mind and everything might just click into place.

 

[LightBulbFun]

If you disconnect the HDD, does the iMac boot from the OS 9 CD?

Another thing to consider; Did the slot loading iMac 400 have the 8gb boot volume limitation? This might be the cause of the weirdness. Try repartitioning with this in mind and everything might just click into place.

all slot loading iMacs are Uninorth based and dont have the 8GB boot limit.

 

[AphoticD]

all slot loading iMacs are Uninorth based and dont have the 8GB boot limit.

Good confirmation. I also stumbled across a recommendation on the slot loading iMacs about the 128GB limit, which was to partition slightly under this amount (e.g. 127.5GB), leaving the remainder as free space.

I didn’t need to do this with my Sawtooth G4s, but maybe it is worth a mention. Somewhere, OS9 appears to be put off by the 128GB+ HDD.

 

[Project Alice]

I did make the partition 127.99 gbs. Maybe I should go smaller? And I haven't tried unplugging the hard drive, that'd be a good test. I'll try that out.
OS9 definitely does have issues with drives that big. When I booted OS9 from my iBook in target disk mode, it asked me to initialize the rest of the hard drive (11 something GBs).