(Elfen you were right, the floppy that I normally put disk tools on had died.  The SCSI CD drive will no longer boot either the c or cs, but I think it may be a termination issue.  This has come up because the 5300c gets really weird screen ripples with the OS 9 drive I had in it, so I'm downgrading to its original 7.5.2, which has been really hard since I wasn't able to use disk tools lol.  Eventually I broke out the G4, attached the drive via USB and just deleted the System folder.  The pre-8 [7.6?] installers are garbage by comparison.)

[(Oh, and just so nobody jumps on the screen ripple issue; it starts just before the extensions start to load on OS 9.  It does not occur before that; it does not persist after restarting; and it has no correlation to the amount of time the machine has been powered on - only to the time from boot, when booting into OS 9.  I didn't want to use 9 to begin with, it just happened to be on the drive and the cs (happily) had a 56mb card that I put in the c.)]