iMac G4 can‘t remember its boot drive in 9.2.2

[macminitosh]

I just installed OS 9 Lives on my 2002 iMac G4, 17 inch, 700Mhz. It boots fine, showing a grey screen, then a blinking floppy drive with a question mark, and after a few seconds, OS 9. But only when booting cold. In OS 9, in System Profiler it will show that no startup disk is selected,  I can select a Startup Disk in its own control panel, which it will show me as selected in system profiler after, but it can‘t „remember“ my selection beyond a reboot, which does fail (blinking folder with question mark).
Option-clicking in the boot menu doesn‘t change this behaviour, as does changing the startup disk from a 10.4 installer.

Am I missing something trivial here? Or does anyone know how to fix this behaviour?

[peeperpc]

I'm not sure about the "but only when booting cold".

If it only boots to your intended drive when booting cold. Then, I would try resetting PRAM. And if that doesn't solve it and your boot drive uses an ATA to SATA adapter. That adapter may be defective.

One of my ATA to SATA adapters will work correctly only when used with a slave drive. If it is used with a master drive (which happens to be the boot drive), I will have a similar problem as you describe.

[macminitosh]

I'm not sure about the "but only when booting cold".

If it only boots to your intended drive when booting cold. Then, I would try resetting PRAM. And if that doesn't solve it and your boot drive uses an ATA to SATA adapter. That adapter may be defective.

One of my ATA to SATA adapters will work correctly only when used with a slave drive. If it is used with a master drive (which happens to be the boot drive), I will have a similar problem as you describe.

That's it! I've previously checked with another adapter (which was unfortunately identical in behaviour), and ruled that out. But now, everything seems to work just fine after installing a new adapter from Startech (which I normally use, but had not laying around).

Thank you so much!