My G4 will not start up using Tiger on partitioned drive!?

[vansolo]

I had my hard drive partitioned into 2 drives and I made a copy of one onto the other (which was empty until I did that). Now, I can't use my current start up disk (Tiger) and my machine just 'thinks' and 'thinks' and never starts up (I had to hold option during startup and switch start-up disk). When I run Norton Disk Dr on it, Norton locks up with errors! When I was looking at the files on the partitioned drive to try to troubleshoot I noticed that the desktop is now just a document file and when i click on it, it disappears!!?? Also, when I duplicate a file onto one part of the partitioned drive, a copy is also made onto the other part of the partitioned drive. I think the drive is confused. I would reformat and reinstall tiger but I don't have Tiger! In the meantime, I'm stuck on 'Safari' using OS 10.2.8 and I can barely surf the web cuz it's so outdated. Please help if you can. Thank you so much...
Vanessa

 

[merl1n]

I had my hard drive partitioned into 2 drives and I made a copy of one onto the other (which was empty until I did that). Now, I can't use my current start up disk (Tiger) and my machine just 'thinks' and 'thinks' and never starts up (I had to hold option during startup and switch start-up disk). When I run Norton Disk Dr on it, Norton locks up with errors! When I was looking at the files on the partitioned drive to try to troubleshoot I noticed that the desktop is now just a document file and when i click on it, it disappears!!?? Also, when I duplicate a file onto one part of the partitioned drive, a copy is also made onto the other part of the partitioned drive. I think the drive is confused. I would reformat and reinstall tiger but I don't have Tiger! In the meantime, I'm stuck on 'Safari' using OS 10.2.8 and I can barely surf the web cuz it's so outdated. Please help if you can. Thank you so much...
Vanessa

How did you make the copy on the 2nd partition? If you did a Finder copy, that will definitely not work. Not only are the boot blocks not copied, but anything owned by the "root" user and certain invisible files will not be copied.

If you can boot from the other partition, use Carbon Copy Cloner to "clone" the working partition to the 2nd partition. The you will have two bootable partitions.

Also, how did you install Tiger to begin with if you don't have the DVD?