Macdrone: If there is such a thing, that would be plenty helpful. My process refers to a "restore" ISO for a 630CD that I downloaded and tried, but a) that ISO isn't bootable on my 640CD and B) the Internal IDE tool right on the root of that disk doesn't detect any ATA devices with or without booting to a disk with the aLoadIDE extension and c) the Drive Setup tool on that disk also doesn't see any devices. In fact, no Drive Setup version on any disk I could get to boot would properly initialize the device. They either refuse to see a device exists or try to initialize it and fail. If I can get a hold of a 640CD disk that actually boots the machine, can see the IDE devices, and properly initialize them, then that will make this process about three pages shorter. After two days of searching, none were to be found (by me that is).

tanaquil: Glad you liked it. I did not try a SATA/IDE USB device, although I have one and a Bondi Blue iMac that might have worked for this scenario. Didn't try it. Easy enough to try, though. I'll check it out and report back.