Can't boot into OS 9

[Wahib]

My Cube (G4 500 MHz) will no longer boot into OS 9, from any device whatsoever (OS 9 installation CD, internal HD, FW HD). What happens is it freezes at the 2nd gray screen (before it gets to the blue smiley-face screen).
so i rebooted with -option- held down to try and select OSX instead of OS9. however, much to my dismay, there was only the one option.

i chose it and still got the same symbol.

tried booting with the jaguar CD, to open terminal and unbless or anything along those lines, but the Installer menu terminal option was grayed out. so then i used an old 10.1 startup CD i made, but that turns out to be no help. it loads my disk into a ramdisk or something... not too sure.

so what can i do? my iBook doesn't startup into single-user mode anymore. i have no access to terminal. please any help? should i just delete the /HD/System Folder ?

It boots fine into OS X (10.3.9) from all of those, and Classic runs fine. It boots into the Apple Hardware Test CD, but it finds no problems.

Ideas?

[Lillebror]

If you're going to upgrade to OS X, I suggest not going further than Panther (10.3). I have an old iMac G3 350MHz with 320MB of RAM, and 10.3 is comfortably usable. It slows down when animating Expose, and it's not that fast most of the time, but it's quite usable. More RAM helps of course. I think the maximum you can put in is 1GB, maybe a little less. But I definitely wouldn't put 10.4 or higher on it.

[Dr. V]

hi,
there are still some applications that is better to run under Mac OS 9.
Virtual PC runs under OS 9 a lot faster than OS X.
QuarkXPress has recently released OS X version of its product (almost 2 years after OS X), because they know the risk of jumping to OS X.

From Apple's position, they would of course encourage people to use Mac OS X. We can only wait and see if OS 9 is possible or not. It might turn out that there will be a special OS 9.2.x just for G5, if demand is high enough.

[SalVatore]

hi,
You don't always need to press the "c" key to boot from the CD. If the iMac cannot find another bootable device (hard drive is blank, right?), it should boot from the CD anyway. Could be the CD drive at fault, or your trusty CD no longer works.