Trouble Installing Mac OS 9.2.2 on G4 Cube

[msx]

Hi all, been lurking about this forum lately and reliving some nostalgia of old Mac OS 9 memories, haha. I've been trying to install Mac OS 9.2.2 onto a Power Mac G4 Cube for the last three or so days with very little luck. Thought it was worth asking for some advice? I'll give as much information as I can.

I am using a Power Mac G4 Cube with a 40GB internal hard drive and a broken CD drive. Any CD I put into the drive is just immediately spat back out. Through using USB sticks and even a USB DVD drive I have been able to put up Mac OS 9 install disks including the Mac OS 9 Lives versions on this site, but haven't been able to install 9 onto the internal hard drive. Mac OS 9 seems to refuse to detect the internal hard drive, even after multiple repartitions and reformatting, every time as a HFS+ with the OS 9 Drivers box checked. If I do the drag and drop method of installing I simply get the flashing question mark on boot up. If I boot up an Install Disc it will load, but won't detect the internal HD and then immediately crash the second I bring up the Drive Setup utility to try and fix it. The HD works absolutely fine in OS X 10.4, scanning the HD shows that the drive is healthy and no errors are detected. Classic mode also runs fine under OS X. When I was first given the Cube it had 10.4 installed on it but I have since uninstalled it while keeping it backed up on a USB stick to ensure I can boot into it whenever needed to access the Disk Utility and such.

I have tried the following:
- Installing Mac OS 9 Lives by burning the image files to both USB sticks, a USB hard drive with an external power supply and CDs, booting into them and installing within Mac OS 9 itself
- Copying over the files from OS9General.dmg to a freshly partitioned HFS+ internal HD with OS 9 drivers installed
- Resetting PRAM
- Installing OS 9 in classic mode on OS X using the installer application (this one seemed like a long shot)
- Directly restoring image files and USB installs to the internal hard drive through Disk Utility
- Booting the Mactron Rescue CD

I included some photos showing my system and HD's details. Any further suggestions? Is there an issue with the HD or the computer itself that's immediately apparent? Would replacing the HD change anything? Thank you for your time,

[GaryN]

Try this: Do the "drag 'n drop" like you did before.
THEN:
1) Open the System Folder
2) Drag the System and Finder out onto the desktop
3) Close your eyes and Say quietly: "I love you Steve Jobs"
4) Put them back
5) Spit into the wind, pray to Buddah or whatever works for you and reboot

This is known as "Blessing" the System Folder. If it works, you should now see the little Mac OS logo on the System Folder. It can now be found by the computer to boot from as a valid System.

Note: There are those who disagree about the necessity of including #3 and #5. Personally, I think they're damn heretics, it can't hurt and you don't really have to admit to it afterward.
Just wait until you get in deeper where you have to resort to voodoo…

[teroyk]

3) Close your eyes and Say quietly: "I love you Steve Jobs"

You heretic!, it should be Steve Wozniak 

5) Spit into the wind, pray to Buddah or whatever works for you and reboot

It is two fingers on computer and pray:"Let it be done."

Just wait until you get in deeper where you have to resort to voodoo…[/i]

That's why there is voodoo cards to PCI-slot

[msx]

Try this: Do the "drag 'n drop" like you did before.
THEN:
1) Open the System Folder
2) Drag the System and Finder out onto the desktop
3) Close your eyes and Say quietly: "I love you Steve Jobs"
4) Put them back
5) Spit into the wind, pray to Buddah or whatever works for you and reboot

This is known as "Blessing" the System Folder. If it works, you should now see the little Mac OS logo on the System Folder. It can now be found by the computer to boot from as a valid System.

Note: There are those who disagree about the necessity of including #3 and #5. Personally, I think they're damn heretics, it can't hurt and you don't really have to admit to it afterward.
Just wait until you get in deeper where you have to resort to voodoo…

Gave this a shot (and absolutely included steps 3 and 5 out of pure desperation!) but still having the same issue. Something odd is that the OS9 logo is appearing on the startup disk selection but not on the folder itself. Something else I thought worth noting was that the flashing question mark appears on the floppy disk as opposed to on the folder, not sure if that indicates a different issue.

[macarone]

You say you are able to boot into OS X. so I would suggest you do that and run DiskWarrior on the OS 9 partition. At the end of doing its thing, it should detect the presence of OS 9 and ask if you want to bless the folder.

This has worked for me when the drag, pray and drop method failed.

But I'm not sure if DiskWarrior will run from a USB stick. I never tried THAT.

You may have to partition the internal HD into OS 9 and OS X volumes.

[msx]

You say you are able to boot into OS X. so I would suggest you do that and run DiskWarrior on the OS 9 partition. At the end of doing its thing, it should detect the presence of OS 9 and ask if you want to bless the folder.

This has worked for me when the drag, pray and drop method failed.

But I'm not sure if DiskWarrior will run from a USB stick. I never tried THAT.

You may have to partition the internal HD into OS 9 and OS X volumes.

Gave this a shot too, it reorganized a lot and while I still wasn't able to get it to boot properly with the same question mark floppy disk image I DID notice a difference where if I rebooted and held down the option key to choose my hard drive, it would display the name of the volume underneath the HD image which it didn't before, which gave me hope that it changed something for the better. The unfortunate and dumb mistake I made however was that I went back into the MacTron rescue disk thinking I might get better results now that I had done that, and in running a disk repair program I accidentally corrupted my USB stick that had the OSX install on it. Oops. Getting late and I'm getting tired so think I'll call it here for the night and will look into installing OSX again tomorrow.

[teroyk]

What is oldest PPC Mac that can boot from USB? I think it is newer than Cube.

[msx]

Some more updates :

- I have tried using firewire and an iBook to install OS9. I couldn't get the cube to boot into target disk mode so instead what I did was boot the iBook in target disk mode instead and then copied the internal hard drive of the iBook to the cube using disk utility's restore function (the iBook already having a working OS9 install on it) . This didn't work unfortunately, same issue with the cube not loading OS9 and crashing on drive setup
- I have bought the screwdrivers needed to open up the cube, I don't currently have a suitable replacement hard drive but out of curiosity I booted the Mac OS 9 Lives install disk from a USB stick while the internal hard drive was unplugged and once I did that it was able to load the drive setup and everything with absolutely no issues and no crashes. There's definitely something up with the hard drive and will try replacing it as soon as I can to see what happens.

[msx]

Update: Got it working now! Still using the old HD, but I unplugged the disc drive and that fixed all the issues I was having. Possibly it was draining too much power?