Okay, the machine in question is a PowerMac 7500, 120mhz 96megs of ram, 600 meg SCSI drive.
I bought this machine used from a local vender, worked great for almost a year running Mac OS 9. Yesterday, I decided I'd give the SuSE PPC version of linux a go, so I stuck in my OS 9 cd, held C and booted off the CD so I could use Drive Setup to repartion the drive into 4 parts. Well that didn't work at all, it just left me with 1 partition instead of 4, and the 1 partition it gave me was the same size as I specified (200 megs). I tried a few more times, and I finally got it to partion the drive up into 4 partitions. But only when I used MacOS Extended. But that wouldn't work for linux anyways, so I shrugged and decided I'd reformat the drive again and set it back to 1 macos extended partition. That's where the problem really starts.
I've got a single mac os extended partition on my drive, and I can copy files to and from a CD or floppy to the drive, but when I try to install OS 9, I get "this program cannot run on this computer". Tried it a few more times, reset the PRAM, took the battery out and put it back in overnight, held CONTROL, held SHIFT, to bipass extensions and virtual memory. But nothing I've done has let me install OS 9 or even OS 8.6.
So I hunted down a version of Drive Setup 1.6, 1.7, and 1.8, updated the drives accordingly and no matter what I've done, it still won't let me install an OS!
I've got a friend with an 8500, and he's had the same thing happen to his box recently. But we've been totally stumped on what to do to fix it :/
I'm stumped, help!