Beige G3 drives making me nuts

This is absolutely infuriating. I have a bunch of Beiges that I've been imaging. I have a number of 6GB and 8GB drives. I built a drive image with 9.2.2 and 10.3.9 with XPostFacto onboard. I've imaged several Beiges with it using NetRestore and a firewire enclosure. I found that I have to format the drive on the Beige, then image it in a Firewire enclosure (trying to format it in the enclosure makes it unreadable in OS 9, even with the box checked in Disk Utility), and then drop it back in the Beige, boot from an OS 9 CD, set the 9.2.2 system folder to start, then reboot, run XPostFacto, and the thing works just fine in OS X. No problems. Until now.
Now, I have an issue that is ticking me off because there is no friggin' reason for it. Nothing has changed. All these Beiges are 266mhz Rev A. No difference. However, all of a sudden, images have stopped working. First thing was that my OS 9.2.1 boot disk stopped recognizing them and asked to initialize at startup...even though they'd been formatted on that very startup CD and had not been reformatted. When I pulled the CD out and left the hard drive, it would try to spin up, click, then spin down ad infinitum. I booted from an 8.1 CD, and it recognized the drive just fine, but setting it to boot produced the same clicking. I figured it was due to 8.1 not being able to set the right system folder.
Okay, so I spent more time than I should have getting a 9.1 CD. I boot up, it recognizes the drive (dunno what the heck was wrong with that 9.2.1 CD) and sees both system folders as bootable. So I set the 9.2.2 system folder to boot as usual...and get the same **** clicking and spindown at startup. It's done this with several working drives. I reformatted it and installed 9.1. The drive booted with no trouble. I reformatted, imaged (no reformat in the image) and put it back...same clicking issue. Several Beiges have been doing this for no reason, and I cannot fathom why. I also don't see why that 9.2.1 CD stopped reading the drives. It's really, really ******* me off. I've tried PRAM resets, NVRAM resets, battery pulls...nothing. The hard drive is on the separate channel as master, no slave drives. The configuration between the already imaged Beiges and the ones with clicking drives are friggin' identical. No difference.
I also noticed that sometimes the Beige takes a little longer to output video. When it does this, the drive spins up and stays up until the system scans it for a boot folder. THEN it clicks and spins down again. When I boot from a CD, I get the click and spindown, but it spins up and mounts when it gets to the desktop. I know these drives are fine, and 9.1 booted off of it...so why in the heck wont they boot from a working image?? I'm seriously at a loss here.

I have seen similar problems in working with a number of beige G3's. I have almost always been working with XPostFacto and 10.3, so I can't really tell whether the problem is an XPostFacto problem or a Mac OS X problem. I found 10.2 Jaguar without XPostFacto much harder to get installed than 10.3 Panther with XpostFacto.
Let me make some broad statements and see whether others can corroborate, or have have different views of the situation:
This does not seem to be a Hardware problem.
OS X, especially before 10.3, had a strong tendency to mangle Mac OS 9 boot data, especially when both 9 and X were on the same partition. It is much less frequent in 10.3, and much less frequent if 9 and X are on separate partitions. I decided to keep separate partitions, one for X and one for Mac OS 9/Classic, and have had much less trouble since.
XPostFacto [or is it Mac OS X?] seems to [ ? accidentally? ] do something to the boot information such that if it can't boot X, it can't boot at all, and gets stuck in a loop like the one you described -- light up the screen, maybe the smiling Mac, then reset and do it again ad infinitum. Other times the screen lights up, then screen goes dark, and rather than coming up in 6 seconds with the grey apple, just stays dark and never comes back.
One working solution is to use XPostFacto (which runs in X and 9) to change to 9 and back, or boot from a 9 CD and run XPostFacto to get its house in order and set XPostFacto to re-enable booting from the drive you really want. Sometimes a de-install and re-install of extensions etc. inside XPostFacto sets it right.
Sometimes you have to reset the PRAM to get a 9 CD to boot.

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You didn't drive anyone nuts.
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Hi all!
I just got a brand new 20-inch Alu iMac with Leopard installed last month as an early Christmas present, my very first mac and love it. I have a couple of questions I thought I'd throw it to you experts out there.
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Beige G3 drives making me nuts

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