Had to reinstall Panther - now CD won't recognize OS9 disks

Question

I have a B&W G3 with 2 hard drives in it. Had to replace the larger of the two, and of course it was the one with my startup system (or one of them.) I could boot from my 9.2 startup disk which was on the other hard drive. I made a copy, using the disk utility restore function, on to a backup drive so that I didn't lose everything on the crashed disk. Then I replaced the hard drive, partitioned it and reinstalled Panther all the way to the most recent update. I was able to capture just about 98% of all of my previous system setting, extensions, etc., yet now when I put in an older CD (that was comaptible with OS9) it says it is "unrecognizable" and wants to inititialize or eject. When I go to system profiler it says there is no OS9 drivers for the CD. It is the original CD ROM from Apple, a matshita CDR. How can I recapture the driver? Where would it be?

Answer 1

Daisy:
Since you already have everything in place on separate partitions, and it is so much of a hassle moving stuff around, I suggest you leave things alone until you need to something by way of re-installation.
In terms of backing up a firewire external HDD would be prefereable as you could then use SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to clone to the firewire external, which you can then use as an emergency startup drive. It makes backing up a lot easier. SuperDuper is very easy to use and efficient. CCC works well, too, but is slightly more complex.
Re: Had to reinstall Panther - now CD won't recognize OS9 disks
Posted: Aug 22, 2007 11:05 AM
So, Cornelius, what you are saying is that I am making it harder for things to function smoothly? The reason I have been doing the partitions is to save time when running something like Disk Utility. It goes a lot faster on a 20GB than it would on a 100GB, or am I wrong in assuming that?
Now I have the daunting task of removing everything that I have finally gotten in place to the backup drive, and reformatting my MAC! UGH! Is there an easy way to do this without re-installing the major programs I use? When I was getting the data off of the previous bad drive, I dragged and dropped them onto the backup disk (a Simpletech 160GB USB) and that was very time consuming. I think it was slow because I have the old USB 1.1 and the backup is a USB 2.0. I did not use the backup software that came with it, because I was in panic mode and accidentally erased the program when I formatted the backup drive. Now I have it, but haven't used it yet. Even so, I was able to drag and drop most of the files and it worked fine, but I had to reinstall the OSX, QuarkXpress, and Indesign. This has been going on for a couple weeks and I am still tweaking things to get it right.
When I used the "restore" function it put the drive on the backup but not in a folder. When I dragged and dropped it went across like folders. Do you have any advice for me to make this less painful?
+One more point - if I did use the install OS9 drivers the first time, and it didn't, what would it do if it was only one partition? Would I get them back or not?+
You can check to see if the OS 9 drivers are installed by going to Apple Menu > About this Mac > More info > Hardware > ATA. In the lower section of the main panel go down the list and look for OS 9 drivers installed. It will say yes, or no.
Good luck.
cornelius