MacOS9 Lives Universal Install Hangs at "Reading MacOS9.img" on Powerbook G3

[cmb1100]

Hello Classic Mac OS fans!

I'm running a PowerBook G3 250 MHz (Wallstreet/PDQ not sure which exactly), to keep having fun with the Classic Mac OS, since unfortunately, I have to get rid of my Quadra 630 with Mac OS 7.6 (I'm downsizing and can't keep all my classic computers with me...).

Knowing that MOS9L is the best place for anything regarding Mac OS 9, I downloaded the Mac OS 9 Lives Universal Install CD, and put it into the CD drive, it boots up (very slowly, but eventually), and when I go to Apple System Restore, I am able to open it, format the 120GB Dogfish m.SATA SSD I'm using (with IDE enclosure) with Mac OS Extended, and it will start the process fine.

However, once the window of the restore process begins, the spinning wheel goes for about 2 minutes, it loads the first bit of the restore, and the whole system hangs. The CD will spin for a few minutes more after that, but with no drive activity, and eventually it will stop spinning and the system has to be unplugged or restarted to try again. The CD drive in this PBG3 is flakey and does occasionally need help to get going, but it was spinning and reading fine up to that point, and I've been able to get music and program discs working with it on Mac OS 9.1 on the original hard drive, albeit not a Mac OS disc. The hard drive is also perfectly detected by Disk Setup and is under 128GB, which is the limit as far as I'm aware for a Wallstreet, so I don't think it's the hard drive's fault.

Any help I could get would be really great

[FBz]

A sketchy CD-ROM drive certainly makes it interesting. Tried “sneaking up on it” when it was cool and attempting the boot-install, first thing after its’ rest period? Carefully blow a little canned air around inside CD drive? Maybe even try MacTron’s Bootable Rescue CD & Disk Repair http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php/topic,1657.0.html instead of the Universal Install disc?

Without access to another good CD drive or access to another external SCSI-based one, you might consider formatting and OS-install that Dogfish SSD in another machine… and then placing it back into yours?

And here’s another possible Wallstreet consideration I didn’t know… and I don’t know if it’s valid.

"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." -LowEndMac

Best of luck.

[cmb1100]

I will try the alternate CD and the compressed air trick but unfortunately I have neither access to a machine that can natively boot Mac OS 9 (next newest only supports Classic, and the next oldest can only go to Mac OS 8.1), nor an external SCSI CD drive. I'll also try the 8GB thing although I thought that was more an issue of Mac OS X.

[FBz]

Recently confronted with that “8GB thing” here with an early G3 iMac resurrection… where tray-load vs. slot-load helped determine necessity. And I’ve a Lombard that always had wonky CD-ROM performance - until reverted back to an OS 9-only machine.

*Also used an old AppleCD 300 (external SCSI CD-ROM drive / M3023) with an HDI-30 SCSI dock on the Lombard… in case you’ve forgotten those items stored away there somewhere.

But hopefully your CD-ROM drive will perform well enough & long enough to get 9.2.2 installed and your Wallstreet PDQ + CD-ROM drive will return to much better performance afterwards.