iMac G3 hard drive not being detected

I forget is this a tray loading or slot loading machine?

Sometimes if volumes don't appear in Startup Manager (what you get when you hold down the Option key at startup), you need to reset the Mac's PRAM, NVRAM, and Open Firmware. Shut down the Mac, then power it up, and before the screen lights up, quickly hold down the Command, Option, P, and R keys, until the Mac has chimed twice more after the powerup chime.

Then, before the screen lights up, hold down Command-Option-O-F until the Open Firmware screen appears. Then enter these lines, pressing Return after each one:

reset-nvram

set-defaults

reset-all

"The reset-all command should restart your Mac. If so, you have successfully reset the Open Firmware settings."

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1812?viewlocale=en_US

Should the fail...

Try taking the battery out for 10 minutes. Put battery back in. Cross fingers. Power the machine back on.

How to eject a cd from the internal cd drive:

eject cd

List of devices:

devalias

List of variables:

printenv

The startup manager will list all of your bootable partitions then give you a choice of which to boot. Hold down the option key then power on. Continue holding down the option key until you see the startup manager. This brings up the startup manager. Click on your hd or disc. Click on right arrow key.

Replace hd?

You were able to read the hd on your emac. Could have been a corrupt filesystem that prevented booting. If you can read it, on the emac the hd is probably ok. What os did you format the hd with. Included mac os x drivers if formatting from x.

Look up "mac os classic blessing hd" on google.

Sometimes you can get the cd drive for a song on ebay. I think the power & data are on the same cable to the cd drive... a little different.

I blessed the system folder it recognized it! but it hangs with mouse pointer after startup manager! WhAT.

Bummer.

Hold down the shift key power on machine for boot. This is safe mode. Might help.

Sure the mouse is good? Try the other usb port.

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start up manager shows up nothing. I used classic to make the 9.0.4 installation through my emac. Is classic preventing the eMac to bless the iMac's hard drive?

My guess would have been that the folder would have been "blessed". Besides the command, in classic if you drag some file, main os file, out of system folder then back in should result in bless.

I formatted the iMac hard drive with 10.4.11 I dont know what good intalling 9 drivers to the drive would do, since it doesnt have OS 9 on there anyway.

My understanding is that you need these hidden partitions to boot classic from hd. If formated with classic they are there.

the iMac's CD drive uses some strange proprietary connector, looks similar to an IDE connector, but with more pins, so I can't use any other CD drive.

The extra pins 4 ? are the standard power pins. There probable document somewhere. I once read about them.

I have been experimenting with a USB flash drive and seeing if it will boot from that or not. Due to the USB 1.1 speeds, It seems to be taking forever, I have installed OS 9 on that.

Will read cd after booted. I have not heard of anyone successing with boot off external usb drive with this machine.

When booting, goes to white screen and tries to read the flash drive. The disk acess light seems to be doing something, it turns on and off every 2 seconds, but this is acess not the standby light. What i dont understand is when i took the hard drive out of the computer and put it in my eMac first when i didnt delete everything, stuff was still on it.

Here is some info on cable conversion for someother cdrom drive. Didn't read carefully. Claimed success.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/579350

Robert

You do not mention the PRAM battery. How old is it? If you do not know its age, it's probably time to replace it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szmBoIp-NoU

Start up chime disappearing could be the sign of a bad battery.