Since this really only indirectly involves Mac OS X, I am sorry if this message does not belong here. But here is my story...
I have a Frankenstein G3 All-In-One. I've added or upgraded the following: a Sanyo CD-RW, an 80 GB hard drive, a USB/FireWire PCI card, 578 MB RAM, and to top it off\an 800 MHz G3 ZIF upgrade.
Anyway, long story short:
The AIO runs OS 9. I had been having some oddball issues that sounded like directory wierdness. Enter the perennial Mac savior, DiskWarrior.
I decided to boot the AIO from my Disk Warrior 3 CD-ROM. This CD has both the Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X versions of Disk Warrior as well the corresponding systems. I figured the AIO would boot from the OS 9 partition. So I load the DiskWarrior 3 CD, restart the AIO, and hold down the "C" key. Weirdness ensued.
First, as long as I held down the "C", the AIO would chime and begin the boot process. The Mac OS 9 smiley face would appear. Then the AIO would shut itself down, chime and begin the boot process all over again. As long as I held down the "C" key, this wonkiness repeated itself.
After a dozen cycles of chime-boot-restart, I let go of the "C" key.
The AIO would now boot into Open Firmware. The CD-RW would spin up. After a few seconds Open Firmware displayed the error message, "can't open:" over and over until this message filed the screen.
Eventually, the AIO would kick itself out of Open Firmware and boot. However, the AIO refused to recognize the CD-RW. I could put in a disk but it would not mount on the Desktop. System Profiler did not detect or report a CD-RW drive present.
I checked out Apple's Discussion forums and discovered that some individuals reported odd CD-ROM/R/RW problems after trying to install OS X on an older Mac. Usually the OS X installation failed for some reason and the person reverted to Mac OS 9. However, Mac OS 9 refused to recognize the optical drive. Changing the optical drives jumper settings from Master to Slave seemed to solve the problem. For me, this did not work.
Furthermore, I tried zapping the PRAM, pressing the CUDA switch, and resetting Open Firmware. Nada.
I eventually opted for an extreme emergency operation.
I happened to have another AIO sitting around for spare parts. I removed all of the drives, RAM, PCI card, and CPU upgrade from the Open Firmware psychotic AIO's mother board. I grabbed the motherboard from my back-up AIO and installed all the upgrades. I installed this motherboard in the psychotic AIO.
Viola! It worked! No problems, no questions, no Open Firmware. Better yet, the CD-RW drive is recognized for what it is in Disc Burner, iTunes, Toast and System Profiler.
Any ideas what what happened and why?
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