[The_Equivocator]

My friend's computer is acting worse than any Macintosh I have ever seen. I went over to her room earlier today to help her install 9.2.1 and 10.1. 9.2.1 installed just fine. I then stuck in the OS 10.1 upgrade CD and double- clicked on the install icon. It restarted in 10, and proceeded to install. We left the room while it was installing, came back a while later to see a blank beige screen. I am assuming that it installed, did the "The
system will restart in 30 seconds" dealie, restarted, and hung on a beige screen.

Side Note:
When I updated to 10.1, I am not sure if she had 10.0.4 installed or not. I made a mistake. I should have booted into 10 and checked to see that it was updated and worked correctly. Instead, I assumed that the 10.1 upgrade
CD would make sure that everything was working properly.
End Side Note.

That is when all hell broke loose.

Every time I tried restarting the computer, the smiley-mac face would appear, the rainbow-spinning cursor would show up in the top-left corner of the screen, the monitor would go all black, and then the beige screen would appear and not go away. I can hear the disk chugging away, but nothing
ever happens. Once I even heard the OS X beep whenever I hit a key on the keyboard, but nothing else.

Of course, I tried booting from my OS 9.1 CD. Nothing. It didn't seem to even try to start up from it. Zapped the P-RAM, nothing. It still tried to start up in 10, and failed. I tried starting up by holding option. I expected it to show an OS X icon as well as an OS 9 icon, but only
the X icon appeared.

I tried to boot from my 10.0 install CD. For some reason, that worked. I ran the Disc Utility program, and first aid said that nothing appeared to be wrong. So, I thinking something might have happened during the install, I tried to reinstall 10.0. It installed fine. It restarted...

Kernal Panic.

Now it panics whenever I turn on the computer. It still won't boot from the 9 CD, but it will boot from the 10 CD.

Please help! I've completely run out of ideas.

Here are the specs of the computer:
PowerMac 733 (purchased right before the quicksilvers came out.)
68 GB SCSI harddrive
Latest Firmware (she says she installed it on Tuesday)
I don't know mow much RAM she has... maybe 256 or 512MB.

[BTP]

Hard to say what went wrong. I doubt that 10.1 would have installed if you didn't have what you needed already.

Reinstall the OS's. Back up the data.

When you zapped the PRAM, did you let it chime at least 3 times?

If you can wipe everything, I suggest that you partition the drives with OS X and OS 9 on seperate partitions. People are divided ondoing this, but I think it is worth doing.

Something (obviously) seriously wrong. and I think that a fresh install is needed.

[dirmania]

Cmd + Opt + P + R should work just fine...
If you follow BTP's recommendation.
After all that,
You should at least being able to start from your OS9CD.
Similar situation happens to me before...

I personally hate to boot up from OSX CDs,
It's lake of setup utility and user controls(especially it only excecute the installer program and disk utility) really drives me mad.

I'll keep my fingers cross for your poor situation