[Awimoway]

I switched to Macs a year ago and have been happily using OS X, so I'm extremely inexperienced with with OS 9. I did boot into it occasionally for some more intense QuarkXPress work that Classic mode couldn't handle, and it always worked fine for me.

Lately, I've been having some OS X kernel panics (not sure of the cause). I've reinstalled the OS and so far no panics. Tonight, I booted into 9 to show my Dad that a CD of pix he burned would work fine on his OS 9 computer at school. I clicked on a jpeg and first got the QuickTime dialog about upgrading to the Pro version. I declined and then everything except the mouse cursor froze. I hit cmd + opt + esc and a dialog popped up that let me force quit QuickTime, but nothing happened. I tried a few more times and nothing happened, so I hit the power button.

Now OS 9 will not reboot. The computer turns on and I get the flashing question mark thing. It goes on like that forever. I've booted up with TechTools, but it doesn't show any hard drive at all, even though OS X disk utility (on its installation disk) sees the hard drive and was able to repair permissions, etc. Also, I had this problem with TechTools before 9 crashed (but after I started having kernel panics).

I've tried rebooting and holding down x, cmd + x, d, and neither worked. I've unplugged all peripherals. I've zapped the PRAM. Nothing has changed the fact that on startup I get the stupid flashing quesrtion mark. I got most of these ideas from this site. It has a couple other possibilties listed, but I don't know if either sounds very wise: "Clear NV RAM (similar to reset-all in Open Firmware), . . . boot into open firmware." I don't even know what they mean or what I do after that.

I just don't know what else to do. Any help would be appreciated.

For what it's worth, I have an iBook. Is there a way to turn on my diseased PowerMac using the iBook as the startup disk (something to do with Firewire target disk mode, but I don't know how it works). I also doubt that I would be able to change my startup disk on the sick PowerMac this way, so maybe that's a pointless idea.

[Jacke]

I've had this happen to me a few times, and I got it solved the first time using Norton Utilities' Volume Recover and the second time I think I used Diskwarrior. If you have access to any of those try them. Can you boot with a CD? If so can you change the Startup disk/System folder with it?

[Awimoway]

Originally posted by Jacke:
I've had this happen to me a few times, and I got it solved the first time using Norton Utilities' Volume Recover and the second time I think I used Diskwarrior. If you have access to any of those try them. Can you boot with a CD? If so can you change the Startup disk/System folder with it?

No, I can't because the only OS 9 startup disk I have (Tech Tools) can't "see" the hard drive, for some odd reason, so I can't scan it for errors and I can't set it as the startup disk. I knnow the hard drive is still connected, though, because my OS X startup disk will let me do repairs on it, but System Prefs to change the sartup disk is not available in that setup.

Apple's solution is to push option at startup and you are supposed to get a list of startup disks/volumes available, but neither hard drive volume is listed.

It looks like the only solution for someone like me who primarily uses OS X will be to do an archive and install of the OS X. That should reset the startup disk to X, I believe. But I am afraid to do this because I currently have a theme in use on OS X, and I am afraid an archive and install with a theme in place will cause major trouble, so I'm looking for another solution.