iMac G3 booting troubles

[hpott]

Hey all,
Long time lurker, first time poster here. I have a slot loading graphite iMac, which up until about a week ago was working perfectly. On a whim I popped in a Tiger install CD with the hope of dual booting both os 9 and OSX. My original plan was to create an image of the internal HDD and save that to a USB hard drive so I could restore my original OS 9 system if anything went wrong, however my Tiger disks don't have that ability. You can imagine my horror when it turns out my drive has stopped ejecting disks. I tried for about half an hour to get the disk out but it is well and truly stuck now. In the OSX startup disk selector on my CD my hard disk still shows up, so I selected it and rebooted, only for the machine to boot back into the CD again. In the iMac's built in boot menu the original hard disk no longer shows up.   I never started the installation process and as far as I am aware nothing was written to the disk so I've got no idea what's going on. I've already tried some open firmware guides on different vintage mac focused forums, but if I'm being honest I've got no idea what I'm doing so some help would be very much appreciated!
Thanks!

hpott

[FBz]

Have you tried booting with your mouse clicked down through the boot process?
Sometime, this works to eject disks. Power on while holding the mouse down... and wait.

Otherwise, you might be looking at a dis-assembly adventure.

Hope not. Good luck.