[mfbernstein]

I'm trying to get ahold of a copy of OS 9 that will boot on an iBook G3/800 (April 2003 edition) that I got off of eBay (I've already got OS 10.3 installed). It didn't come with software, but I naively thought my iMac G4/800 OS 9.2.1 CD would do the trick. No dice. Nor, for that matter does a generic OS 9.0 CD, or PowerMac G4 OS 9.2.2 CD work.

After (belatedly) looking at Apple's official info. on the topic (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25114), it looks like only the original CDs that came with this model are going to work. Any suggestions as to where these might be tracked down? The problem is that they're specific to this final model of iBook G3s, meaning even most icebook restore CDs won't do the trick.

Thanks.

[gooser]

1. call apple. no kidding. they may have some that they will sell you.
2. what i did was use an old ipod (any portable firewire hard drive will work) and copied over an os 9 system folder from another computer.
3. does yours have a cd-rom drive? a few 800's with a cd-rom drive would not boot into 9.

[mfbernstein]

Thanks for the comments. I suppose I will call Apple when I have the chance. I'm a bit doubtful that almost 4 years after production, they still have CDs for the machine though.

The problem is that any OS 9 I try, whether on internal or external hard drive, or on CD-ROM, fails to boot (although OS X readily boots from either). This is the basic CD-ROM drive model, but the built-in CD-ROM is broken, so I've been using an MBP in Firewire Disk mode as an external CD-ROM (which, as I say, works, at least for OS X 10.3 and 10.4).