I have a iMac 350 indigo at my desk.
It had a corrupt drive so I replaced it with a 7 gig quantum drive.
I cannoot appear to boot to any cd other than my OS X 10.3 boot cd but I don't like booting to that cd since this iMac does NOT have the updated firmware.
Therein lies my problem. I need to install os 9.1 so that I can upgrade the firmware to 4.1.5 or whatever the firmware update version is.
So i have tried 5 different cds. 3 offical mac os cds (9.0.4, 8.0, 8.5, 9.2) and 2 burned copies (9.1, 9.2). None of them will boot. I get the question mark and then the smily mac and then the question mark and it repeats.
The only way i can get it to boot is by using the os x.3 disk 1 but i dont' want to screw up the iMac by messing around with that.
I took apart my mac and tried cleaning the laser eye on the slotloading drive. It didn't help but the disks did seem to read better (by telling with sound, they spun up faster and smoother).
I then still figured it was a bad drive.
SO i went and made an external ide cable for my imac. Basically i took a 50 pin scsi cable, ripped off 10 of the wires on the proper end, and then put 2 ide headers on the cable (1 right near the 50pin header for the hard drive and 1 at the end of the cable). I then plugged that in and ran the cable outside the imac and plugged the ide cable end into a standard ide cdrom drive that i put into a external scsi enclousure (for power purposes only).
ONce that was done, i tried booting up. Same exact symptons. The system still boots fine to that os x.3 cd in the external cdrom drive (a 32x cd burner from a HP tower, its actually a Samsung SW-232).
So i'm kinda at a loss, why won't this stinkin' system boot to a "classic" os but will boot to a X cd?
And if there is a possible way of updating the apple firmware via booting into OpenFirmware, how can i do that?
Sorry for such a long posting...
(Sorry, one note, i did not try the 9.2 boot offical cd, that was a mistype.)
I've read sites that advise installing 9 on a spare HDD on a different Mac, and trying tot boot from that.
http://www.capecodgraphics.com/imac_firmware.htm Has info about the firmware problem, but recommends doing a drive swap if the iMac will power up.
http://www.macintouch.com/panfirmware.html I hate the layout of this page, as it has the old, bad, info at the top. VERY BAD FOR NEWBIES! But, it has some good tips if you read it through before you try anything.
Thanks for the links, but I actually managed to get it working after i tried like 4 more cds that I found (os cds). I finally found one os 9.1 cd that would boot the system. I even copied it and the copy booted fine but none of my others would boot up (even 3 orignal cds). I then updated the firmware and got os x.3 on the system and it works great.
Good news.