IMac G3 CRTwill not  boot up and is in command prompt gray screen.

Need help, please.
Am helping a retired teacher neighbor with her iMac G3 CRT 1998 Tray CD-ROM model.
Sometime the last 3 weeks she unknowingly upgraded the iMac OS. It would not restart after the upgrade. She left it off since. I rebooted it two hours ago and it went through and started up. Surprisingly. Then I downloaded security patches and rebooted the iMac. Now it won't start up, again.
We have a gray screen with middle folder icon that flashes ? and mac icon.
This is on top of Unix command prompt screen with this message.
Apple iMac Open Firmware 3.0.f2 built on 04/23/99 at 14:31:03
Copyright 1994-1999 Apple Computer, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
0 >_
She does not have any CDs...we've looked, even though she bought this new.
Have a Tiger DVD and it would not read in the CD-ROM.
Have downloaded the Apple Emergency Handbook and gone through some of the suggestions without success:
1. There are no error messages.
2. Have tried to reboot with pressing down 'Command", "Control" and Power Button. No success.
3. Unplugged the iMac for 10 minutes, pressed the Power Button on the CRT a seconds, (wait the 10 plus minutes) and reboot. No success.
4. Reset the PRAM with "Command", "Option" "P" and "R" buttons immediately after reboot. No success.
5. Cannot bless the Systems folder since cannot get to the desktop.
It would be awesome to get this fixed so she would not have to pay.
Thanks, in advance, for any suggestions!
Eric

I remember upgrading the iMac about 2 or 3 years ago to 10.2 or 10.3 by installing a larger drive
If you installed a drive larger than 8GB with the OS already installed on the drive, that is probably your problem. Tray-loader iMacs have a limitation in the IDE interface that only allows the first 8GB of the drive's space to be accessible during the startup sequence. This problem is documented in this Apple article
http://support.apple.com/kb/TA22193
If you used the standard installation process, Installer will not allow you to install Mac OS X on a volume that exposes this limitation. But if you bypassed Installer by installing a drive that already had Mac OS X on it, it will work for a fine as long as all the system components needed during the startup sequence remain under the 8GB limit. But if something gets moved or installed above the 8GB limit (and that something is needed during startup), you will see this problem. Note: Once the startup sequence is completed and the full OS takes over control, the rest of the drive (up to 128GB max size) becomes accessible.
If this is the problem, what you need to do is take that drive out of the tray-loader iMac, put it into an external drive enclosure, connect it to another Mac, and back up the data. Repartition the iMac's drive so that the first partition is fits entirely into the first 8GB of disk space (7.5GB is a good number to use). The second partition can be the rest of the space, up to 128GB total for both partitions. (If the drive is actually larger than 128GB, please post back.) Then, restore the data from the backup.

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