Panther-ised! With a BIG issue though :(

#1 Sat, 11 Oct 2008 - 07:07 68kMLA

So, about 5 years late, my iMac 333 is finally running Panther!

However...there is a slight (big) problem....

The internal 24x notebook CD-ROM drive, well, lets just say its seen better days, and has trouble booting off CDs. Therefore, I had this great idea to use one of my many spare desktop IDE CD-ROM drives, and daisy-chain it off the iMac's primary IDE bus. Found my 8x Goldstar (LG) drive, which I've used in the past to boot the iMac, that did the job and I soon found myself installing Panther. After about an hour or so, the installation had completed without an issue, and my iMac was running Panther rather nicely. So after that, I decided to put the iMac back together the way God intended. Turn the machine on and I get a blinking question mark. I put in an OS 9 CD and made sure that the correct partition had been set as the startup disk (yes, I did make a partition within the first 8GB, which I installed Panther on). The iMac is back together, so that means it has its original CD-ROM drive, which as we know has trouble booting off CDs. So I pulled it apart, and hooked the Goldstar back up. I pressed the power switch, and all on its own accord, it booted straight up into Panther, without an issue. I shut it down and try again without the drive connected. We're back to square one. I've tried zapping PRAM, didn't help one iota. I'm at a loss...what could be causing this to happen? The hard drive, a WD 80GB is set to Master, which it should be. (when I had the Goldstar connected the Goldstar was set to slave)

Anyone have any ideas?

thanks in advance

#2 Sat, 11 Oct 2008 - 07:09 68kMLA

did u set the startup disk to the panther partition?

#3 Sat, 11 Oct 2008 - 07:12 68kMLA

Indeed I have! But all I get is a blinking question mark :-/

#4 Sat, 11 Oct 2008 - 12:43 68kMLA

All fixed...turns out the drive had to be set to single drive...works fine now

#5 Sat, 11 Oct 2008 - 17:32 68kMLA

And now you know that WD does it differently (with thought, of course). It's a caveat worthy of the attention of all of the enlisted here.

de

#6 Sun, 12 Oct 2008 - 06:00 68kMLA

Indeed...I remember a couple of years ago when I was putting one of their drives into my Performa, how I had to jumper it specially for the Performa, in fact I think it was actually you that pointed me in the right direction. They do strange things, that company.

#7 Sun, 12 Oct 2008 - 07:54 68kMLA

I normally put all of my drives in single master mode anyway if its the only drive on that IDE channel. But with the WD 120gb HDD in my Beige G3 AIO i could have the drive set in Master with slave mode or in single master mode and not have a issue booting OS X. the same goes for the Pioneer DVR-110D that was in it at the time.