10.2.8 Freeze and now I can't use 9.2

Question

Background:
I have a 15" flatscreen G4 iMac that came with 9.2 and 10.1. I recently upgraded (yes, I'm a dinosaur) to 10.2.8. Last night, I decided to play the old, classic game from Lucas Arts, Full Throttle. I boot it up via Classic in OS 10.2.8, but the audio is really weird, so I think, "no problem, I'll just restart in OS 9.2." I select OS 9.2 as my Startup disc within my OS 10.2.8 System Preferences, restart, then load the game disk, and double-click on the game icon already installed in my Applications (OS 9) folder. The computer hard freezes solid. No mouse arrow...nothing. I turn off my iMac by holding in the power button for 5 seconds. I wait about 30 seconds, push the power button and the iMac comes back to life. Unfortunately now (I'm still starting up in 9.2), I have the dreaded flashing disk icon with a question mark.
I reboot using the OS 9 CD, run disk repair, and it cannot fix the following two errors found:
b-tree error
Disk Mount error
I use the OS 9 CD to acess the old apple menu, choose Startup, and select OS 10.2.8, and restart. All is good. My iMac is fine in OS 10.2.8, but I have not tried Classic since the freeze, and I know that right now it will not boot in OS 9.2
Any help or ideas? I'd rather not have to wipe my drive and re-install everything. Both systems (OS X and OS 9) are on the same hard drive that is NOT partitioned from the factory.
Do I need to buy DiskWarrior? If so, do I boot the computer with the DiskWarrior CD and let it do its magic, or use my System Preferences in OS 10.2.8 to select the 9.2 startup disk, then when the question marks come up, use the DiskWarrior (or other Utilities program)?
Thanks!

Answer 1

Hi Jayworld,
this used to be a common problem until 10.3.x. MacOS X changes quite a few files in the OS 9 systemfolder in order to be able to use it as Classic environment. When you boot into OS 9 natively this often caused problems. During the transition period when many users used 9 and X natively parallel it was strongly suggested to seperate OS 9 "native" and OS 9 "Classic" on seperate partitions.
The message you received might also be an indication that your directory suffers from major corruption. Although this ddoes not show in X yet it might become apparent there soon. Therefore I strongly suggest you run DiskWarrior or TechTools Pro on it as soon as possible.