>This machine does not have FireWire unfortunately.
My apologies! I hadn't looked up the specs on your particular iMac (Bondi Blue)
Not only doesn't it have FireWire, but the Hard Drive and Optical Drive are on a singe ATA bus connected as Master/Slave.
Manufacturers of optical drives always advise that their drives must be connected as a Master drive. That may be the reason you are having problems with the CD drive.
From a description of the Bondi Blue:
"Aimed at the low-end consumer market and designed with the internet in mind,"
It was designed as an appliance, not as an upgradable, expandable computer.
If you are interested in doing serious work using OS 9, I believe you would do better by finding a G4.
Just backing up the hard drive to a USB "stick" will be agravatingly slow on this computer.
If you really like the "look and feel" of this model, condsider finding an iMac (Summer 2001) which has both FireWire and Ethernet, a much larger hard drive, and much more RAM. It still has the problem of the hard drive and optical drive being connected on the same ATA bus in a Master/Slave configuration.