[thetman]

I recieved a powerbook g3 400mhz (lombard) but i didnt get a cd or dvd drive with it. it boots fine but was wiped so there is no OS. I have a usb cd/rw but it didnt boot from the os9 or 10.3 disc i put in the drive, do the laptops of that age support booting from usb devices, if not is there another way i can get an os installed with an optical drive. I do have a vst zip drive but im pretty sure there is no os that will boot from that. if possible i would be open to a net install of linux if i cant do mac os

[tooki]

No, a Lombard doesn't support USB booting -- only AGP Macs do, and even then only into Mac OS 9.

You absolutely can boot from an internal zip drive, or from an external SCSI unit. Of course, Mac OS X won't fit, but Mac OS 9 will.

tooki

[thetman]

so do i just use another mac to copy a os 9 disc onto a zip or is there a special way to make it bootable, thanks for the help too

[tooki]

As long as the zip disk is formatted as HFS or HFS+ (not DOS!!), dragging a Mac OS 9 system folder (not from CD, but from a working machine) to the disk should be all you need.

tooki