Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

Hi there,

I need to cleanse (wipe out) the hard drive of a bunch of eMac, some of them have OS9 and some have blank harddrive. I was told that a 10.3 installation disk can also be booted in OS9, and then I can use the disk utlity function to wipe the hard drive.

However, every time I put the disk in an eMac (the colorful ones) and press the c key at start up, eMac spit out the disk after a while and boot from the HD instead.

My disk worked in PowerG4 and other newer Mac.

If 10.3 doesn't work on OS 9, what can I do? I don't have OS 9 disc, but I do have a whole bunch of eMac to be cleansed ad\nd then donate to non-profit.

I work for a school.

Thanks so mcuh!!

Aaron

Is the 10.3 Installation disk black? Or is it gray with a label specifically for the eMacs? One more question, when you say you have the colorful eMacs, I thought they were all sort of white. Do you have iMacs? Welcome to 'NN!

Hi Sherman,

Yea, they are iMacs actually. I have both iMacs and eMacs. My install disk works well on eMacs, but not on iMacs (the white ones). The disk I have is a copy from another department, and the one they have is a copy as well. It works on eMacs, Powerbook, Power G4, but not iMacs. iMacs require some kind of speacial installation disk?? I just want to wipe the hard drive. Any other way I can do it? Thanks so much in advance !!!

Best,
Aaron

Installation disks are keyed by type, so that if you have the eMac install disk, you cannot use that on your iMac (and vice versa).