Restore Mac OS 9 on Powermac G4

Hi all.

I have an old PowerMac G4 MDD (1.25GHz, NOT the FireWire800) that I use to control a SCSI scanner. It came with OSX Jaguar on one hard drive.

I would like to:

- be able to boot to OS9, as some functions of the scanner (color management) were implemented on OS9 but never made it to X (and the manual clearly says that they do NOT work in the classic mode of OSX, only in plain OS9 started at boot-up time)

- upgrade to a later version of OSX (not that important for the moment and not the topic of this question); the scanner driver for OSX works OK in Jaguar (although it may be more or less a beta version) but I am not sure it will work in newer versions of OSX

To achieve these goals, I added another hard drive and reinstalled OSX Jaguar from the restore CDs, onto that second hard drive (I do not want to mess with my working system). I then proceeded to use the 4 restore CDs to reinstall the applications and OS9. I went to the "startup disk" menu and selected OS9 (on the correct drive..) then went back to "show all", clicked on "change", went back to startup drives, reclicked on OS9 and restarted. However, I get the "blinking question mark on floppy" as if there were no OS.

I went back to the freshly reinstalled OSX (thanks to the other disk, I can avoid using a CD to restore OSX boot), did the rebuilding of the OS9 system folder. I also tried to repair the permissions after booting to the OSX install CD. None of this helps, and I still get the question mark whenever I select OS9.

Does anyone know how to be able to successfully boot to OS9 ?

Thanks in advance for the help!

Note: I know about VueScan, which is a solution that is often proposed on various fora. This scanner does NOT work with VueScan, and I confirmed with Mr. Hamrick that he has no intention of ever supporting it (too expensive a scanner at the time of production, thus very few people own one and it would not be profitable).