As luck would have it I spent most of the weekend trying to fix my old B&W G3 Macintosh. She’s officially named Venus. In trying to install an update to an ATI video card, I somehow made things worse and ended up corrupting the main hard drive. At first I thought I had killed the video card, but as it turns out, the main hard drive was corrupted and would no longer boot into OS X. Since Venus has multiple hard drives, the other disk that has OS 9 began to boot up.
After trying to install OS X again onto the main drive, and not being able to have Venus boot up into OS X, I gave up and bought a new hard drive and set it up. It appears that even if I could select the old main hard drive as a start up disk, the fact that the directory was corrupt would not allow the Open Firmware system to load the bootloader file for OS X. It would have been easier if Mac OS 9 would have told me that the main drive was corrupt, because the OS 9 Finder saw the drive fine.
If you ever wanted to know more about OS X, read through KernelThread’s OS X Guide, which gives you a hacker’s point of view of OS X and how it works.
Most of all remember your startup keys:
- SHIFT: to disable all extensions.
- C: to boot from CD/DVD.
- X: to boot OS X.
- S: to boot OS 9.
The most surprising thing of having to use OS 9 again, was to realize there is no official 1.x version of Firefox that works for OS 9.