[Hammer65]

I am having a problem with an original iMac 233 that I am hoping someone can help me with. This machine has been running OS X 10.2 for months on it's original hard disk with no problems. I have just installed a new Maxtor 120GB drive in the machine and set about installing Panther on it. I first partitioned the drive with the first partition being 8GB in size and second being the remainder of the disk. At the point in the install when the machine needs to be restarted so that additional items from the other install disks can be installed, it will not boot from the hard disk.

The following things are what I tried mostly to no avail and I never got the machine to boot into OS X.

1. Used the disk utility to fix anything that may be wrong with first partition. Everything checked out including permissions.
2. Put in an OS9 CD and installed on the second partition. Tried to boot from this partition. Boot was successful. Examined the first partition contents and all OS X files seemed to be in order.
3. Did second OS 9 install on first partition alongside of the OS X system already there. Machine would not boot into OS 9 from that partition.
4. Erased first partition using OS 9 and tried OS 9 install and boot again. No success.
5. Erased and repartitioned drive and performed install of OS 10.1. No success.
6. Erased disk and installed OS 9 on 120GB volume as a whole. Machine will not boot from hard disk.

This machine has the latest firmware for iMac.

Any help would be appreciated. This is my wife's machine and she's not quite as patient about such things as I am.

[austeros]

what i would try is to use your latest osX disk first to reformat the drive and set up your partitions, ive always had better luck using the osX disc utility then the classic one. after you booted X sucessfully, then install 9.

are you sure you installed the working classic system on to the remainder of the drive? an imac 233 can only boot from the first 8 gigs of the system, so you need to put any os files there. sounds like you might have got confused when installing..

hope this helps yo

[tooki]

The boot partition must be entirely contained within the first 8GB. The very first things on the disk are the driver partitions and whatnot, which consume a small amount of space -- but enough that if you make the first data partition exactly 8GB large, it is pushed over the 8GB boundary.

So re-partition with the first partition as 7.9GB, and the balance as the second partition, and you should be OK!

tooki