Mac will not startup 1

[Jtrouble]

I replaced my harddrive on my G4 desktop about a month ago. Unfortunately my Mac was acting up because I had both OS 9 & OSX on the same partition so I repartition the harddrive in half having OS 9 on one and OSX on the other partition. I was int he process of reinstalling all of my software programs booted in OS9 and I crashed trying to install Mathtype. Since then I have tried numerous things to get the mac up and running but I cannot get to either partitions on the harddrive.When I try to boot from a OS9 cd it just sits on the happy mac, when I try to boot from the harddrive I get the flashing question mark, when I boot from Symantec Utilities I cannot see the harddrive, and when I boot from the OSX disk I cannot see the harddrive either. I tried to rest the PRAM and still nothing.

 

[jimoblak]

Unfortunately my Mac was acting up because I had both OS 9 & OSX on the same partition

This is not a cause for trouble: OS9 and OSX can easily co-exist on the same partition. Creating partitions may have caused trouble. OSX should reside in the first, main partition.

Do you hold the C key to boot from CD?

Do you hold the X key to boot to OSX?

Are you using a recent version of Symantec that supports OSX?



- - picklefish - -
Why is everyone in this forum responding to me as picklefish?

 

[Jtrouble]

I have tried holding the c key down and that will boot the cd for OS9 but still I cannot get to the harddrive.

I am also using the most up to date Symantec I specifically purchased it for this issue.

How can I tell which partition OSX is on? Meaning if it is on the first partition. The reason I partition is because we have several macs here and all of them that have OSX & OS9 on the same partition cause nothing but trouble when people which back and forth between OS9 and OSX. And we have to switch back and forth we cannot work in the Classic mode.

Any ideas how I can get it to recognize the harddrive?

 

[jimoblak]

OSX and OS9 are designed to work on the same partition. You have other issues if they are not playing well together.

Mixing OS9 and OSX (whether on separate or same partitions) often causes problems when jumping between systems. When in OS9, users can purposefully or unknowingly delete or rename critical OSX system files.

Another possible drive/system utility you can try is Drive 10.

Can you temporarily put the questionable drive in another Mac as a second physical hard drive? Copy the needed files from the buggy drive to the good one then reformat & partition the buggy drive.

You might also check to be sure your firmware is up to date.

- - picklefish - -
Why is everyone in this forum responding to me as picklefish?

 

[Jtrouble]

Good suggestion I will try to install it in another mac and see if I can get to the harddrive. Any specific way you think I should go about doing this?

 

[drlex]

I'm late to the party, but I had problems with startup and partitions after installing a new HDD on my old CRT iMac and then subsequently upgraded to OS X from 9.2.
The finger pointed at the fact that I had partitioned the drive using OS 9 rather than OS X, even though OS X was on the first partition and the partition was less than 8Gb (a necessary condition for the model of iMac).
When I reformatted and reinstalled using OS X, the problem went away. You might wish to consider this when you investigate your 'buggy' drive.
lex

"Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana."

 

[Jtrouble]

You were right jimoblak. I installed the drive as a slave in another mac and the partitions came up right away I repartitions it back to one drive installed the operating system and installed it back into the original mac. And I'm up and running again. Thanks for the valuable info!