[Rev-O]

My iMac displays ye olde folder with a question mark upon power up. It was running in classic under 10.3.5 when members of my family (who shall remain nameless, but I'm married to one, and the other one is 3 years old ) did god knows what to it.

Am I correct in assuming that the start up volume is cooked in one way or another?
Why cannot I use my iBook via firewire, also running 10.3.5, as an external boot drive to get my iMac up and running?
Alternately, I have an external fw hd. How do I go about making this a bootable volume for this and future issues?

Or should i just use target mode to get all the important stuff of the iMac's hd and do a fresh install with the iMac system cd's followed by 10.3?

A bunch of questions, I know. I'm leaning towards the fresh install myself, but maybe there is an option I've missed. I'll admit that I'm somewhat of a noob with all this!

Thx

[Rev-O]

Duh. Target mode iBook, option + power on iMac, iMac recognizes iBook as external bootable volume, loads OS 10.3.5 off of iBook, is up and running. Go to system prefs on iMac, pick 10.3.5 on iMac as start up disc, restart. G2G. Just haven't tried my OS 9.2 start up disc yet.

Poor little iMac just must've been feeling needy and decided to act up in order to get some attention.