I'm sure I'm missing something, but I finally put together the bits and pieces of an iBook for a project and I can't get OS 9 to install. The background is that the machine once had Linux on it because I didn't understand the upgrade path of OSX nor did I appreciate the legacy of 9. When I push the power button, the happy Mac is there and the pinwheel spins for about 10 seconds and then stalls.
This would indicate OS X is trying to boot but failing and hanging.
This will stay for hours before I force shutdown. I snagged the download of the Universal Install of OS 9 from the forums (using Windows 10 since that machine is the only optical media burner in the house) and tried to burn the iso. Windows says the file is not valid.
The iso probably didn't download correctly. Did windows complain about the iso before burning or did it burn and then complain? If it complained after burn that might be correct as windows can't natively read the files system inside the iso.
No worries. I throw the iso on a flash drive and under OSX 10.11 I can extract all the folders and files and whatnot. I move those back to the flash drive then back to the Windows box, burn to a disk. Nothing comes up in the boot chooser. I put the iso and the extracted folders and files on the flash drive (because what the hell) and cram that in the iBook. Still no boot.
What am I missing?!?!
The iBook can boot from usb but to do so you have to boot into Open Firmware and explicitly tell it to boot from usb and even then it's hit or miss. The usb drive would have to be formatted HFS+ to be bootable. If you are writing the files from windows then it is likely formatted as fat32 or fat which is not bootable by the ibook.
Copying the files to the usb drive then to the windows machine and burning a disk will also do two things that will cause problems.
1. the resulting cd will not be formatted with a file system that is bootable by the iBook.
2. All the resource forks for the files will not be burned. This will also prevent booting as a large chunk of the operating system code is in resources.
I might suggest trying to download the iso again.
That's where I would start.