iMac G3 with OS 9.2.2 won't boot. Any suggestions?

Hello to all of the apple support communities.

I have an iMac G3 of the tray loading grape coloured kind. It ran a slightly faulty OS 9.2.2 for years, until one day when I thought "I'm fed up of all these faults with my OS. I'll try and reinstall 9.2.2." So I wiped the HD, partitioned it so there was one partition of just under 8GB as my system drive, and the other as just for keeping stuff on. My CD drive doesn't work, so I just copied all the files from the 9.2.2 CD on to the 8GB partition and when put back in the Mac, it booted with the folder with a Finder smiley face and that was it. It got no further. I tried with different parts of the CD files but no luck. Then, I thought "I know, I will just put the system and application folders that I saved from the old faulty OS back onto the drive so at least it will boot." No such luck. Although these are the same files that this mac has booted from years after year, it still just displays the folder with the finder smiley and jams there. You can hear the drive spinning round, and it is working over a HD bridge on my PowerMac G5 as I write this (that is how I transferred files onto and off of it). It just doesn't seem to make any sense. I know that if it was one of the later G3s with firewire, I could boot it from a firewire drive, but it isn't. Just USB 1.1. When I partitioned the drive, I made sure to check that I had the "make OS 9 bootable" box ticked and it is formated as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). If any of you have some suggestions then I would be very grateful,

Best Regards,

Jacob.