Progress! After last night's failure, I called to mind this oft-repeated basic information from lowendmac.com (taken in this case from their Wallstreet PDQ page. See the last paragraph in the overview section).

If you have a hard drive larger than 8 GB, you should partition is so that the first partition is under 8 GB in size (for simplicity, we suggest 7 GB). Failure to do this could eventually result in an unbootable computer, as all System files must be within the first 8 GB of drive space. These Macs can work successfully with larger drives for some time, but once a System files goes outside of the first 8 GB of space, you'll have nothing but problems.

Click to expand...

I went back, partitioned my boot disk with a 1GB partition for MacOS 9 and then reinstalled everything using the same install disks.

This time, no question mark!

It started booting into OS9, and then crashed halfway through.



So, one issue resolved. Now to try the other install disk options I have available.