G4 boot from external OS9, but now won't boot back to 10.4?

Question

Sorry if this may be a little confusing..
Basically I have an old sawtooth/AGP single processor unit from a friend who moved to New Zealand to work on a movie/graphics project.
He upgraded it to a newtech 1.6 processor.
The problem is I booted into 9.2 via external firewire as I still have some specialty cards/apps that are not supported in 10. The mouse will not "click" for selection purposes, it only moves the cursor which does not allow me to go into the control panels and select the "startup disk" utility and go back to 10.4 or anything else for that matter.
I unplugged the external firewire while shut down and restarted assuming it would pick one of the two internal drives with OSX.
It did not! It gets to the grey OSX "apple logo" screen and then powers off.
When I plug the external back in, it will start all the way to desktop9, but the same problem persists in that neither the new wireless mouse nor the old G3 puck will click.
I do not have an apple keyboard that works, so the "new" wireless one will not work for keyboard startup commands, so I cannot just press "x" or "c" and boot to another source that way. I do have a G3 usb mouse I dug out of the closet (I just recently recycled my old Apple II+ from said same closet) but as I said it does not "click".
I tried the programmer's button while in OS9 to try to command boot to the OSx drives. The dialog box showed up, but it won't take the commands; ie: nothing happened.
Next I tried plugging the firewire (while shut down) into an external with OSX. Nothing!
I plugged it back into the 9 drive and get to the desktop with the same useless mouse problem.
I am considering pulling the internal battery in hopes it will kill the boot memory and perhaps default back to the OSX disks again.
Any thoughts and ideas are much appreciated!
Many Thanks!
El Jefe de Biosmell!

Answer 1

Hi, biosmell -
I am considering pulling the internal battery in hopes it will kill the boot memory and perhaps default back to the OSX disks again.
That should work to reset PRAM, which contains the boot volume selection. Be sure to also pull the power cord, and to wait long enough; about a half hour should be fine.
After replacing the battery and reconnecting the power cord, wait another couple of minutes and then boot it - by default it should boot to the first OS it finds on a local (i.e., internal) hard drive.