[fykthebryk]

I'm a newly christened Jaguar user after toiling with 9.2 for years (yah it's pathetic; installed Jaguar Xmas 2002).

1. My first problem was when I tried to restart my machine in 9.2 just to test the whole dual boot thing, the 9.2 crashed giving me that annoying "?" icon instead of the happy mac icon. So I force restart it back to OS X. Luckily the OS X, reliable as it is, booted without any problem. I haven't touched the 9.2 ever since.

2. Now here's another problem. I need to re-install my old QuarkXpress 4.1 so I can print some old quark files from school but when I inserted the CD and clicked on the "install" icon, the quark installation crashed. (the 9.2 window in OS X turned on. it's just the actual quark installation that crashed)

Now I still have all the install CDs (8.5, 8.6, 9.2, 10.2.3). What would you do? Should I re-install the 9.2? Will this revert my entire machine from Jaguar to 9.2 and hence me needing to re-install Jaguar all over again? I just need to see a simple quark file (sigh)

my machine's specs:
g3 Powerbook Lombard
400 MHz
384 MB RAM
6 GB hard drive (although I just order a 20GB IBM Travelstar HD)

3) as a bonus question, what do you guys suggest for a reasonably priced backup drive? (things i have in mind are USB drive 16MB<least expensive> to firewire external hard drive <most expensive cos i still need to get a firewire PCMCIA card>) I'm not discounting the ZIP drive if they are cheap now.

any help is much appreciated. thanks

[Ryøkan]

I'm not a big expert, so keep that in mind. But I switched to OS X 10.2 from OS 9.2, on my 2001 G3 iBook, about a month ago.

At one point I also got the ? in OS 9. It turned out my OS 9 "system," in its system folder, was corrupted. I had to do a clean install, and it was fine. (You have to do this by starting up from a disk.) Your preferences revert to default, but you can salvage them from the "previous sytem folder" that gets created when you do a new install.

As for your question about whether OS X will be screwed up by any of this -- the answer is "No." OS X is in its own world; it seems not to be touched by re-working OS 9, except for the OS 9 folders that will show up in OS X.

As for your other questions -- sorry, I have no idea. I don't work with those programs.

By the way, I was quite hesitant and skeptical about migrating to OS X, especially since I've got a G3 machine. I'd heard it was slow. Well, it's a little slow, but I've come to like it. Takes some getting used to -- finding stuff and how to do things. But it's definitely more stable. And I've gotten accustomed to "MAIL" and "SAFARI" instead of Outlook and Explorer. No love lost, for me, ditching microsoft.

Good luck.

[Ryøkan]

Here are a few more thoughts. The "?" means that your computer can't find a system to start up with. As I said above, this can happen if your OS 9 system file is screwed up. But here's another possibility - when you go to "Start-up Disk" in OS X's system preferences, you'll be given choices -- what system to load on re-start. You may have more than one OS 9 in there, and one (or some) of them might not be functional. (This can happen for a whole bunch of reasons.)

So, if you're given more than one choice of OS 9 start-up disk, make sure you select the one that was working before you began using OS X. You may have to do a search (use Find) to locate old systems and figure out which is which.

But if this doesn't work, to the best of my knowledge it means that your OS 9 system got screwed up. Mine seems to have gotten corrupted when I downloaded an up-date -- to 9.2.3 or something like that. It was a 6-hour download, something went screwy.

I hope this helps.