IMac g3 starts to boot OS9 but then a loud beep and an icon flashes

Question

I found an old imac G3 that somebody put out in the trash. Plugged it in and the screen comes on with the OS9 logo and it says starting up. But then a loud tone starts to beep from the speakers and an icon starts to flash at the bottom right of the screen. The icon looks like ether a CD or maybe a hard drive and it says "looking" underneath the icon.
It is the iMac G3 Blueberry with 350mhz, 512k L2 cache, 64 mb sdram, 6g HD, 24x cd drive.
Please help,

Answer 1

Hey Big,
I know what you said about investing in a 9 year old g3 but this is more of a hobby for me right now. I plan on maybe giving it to my son so he can browse the internet with it.
I've got my two kids on a 400 and a 600 iMac respectively. They're 8 and 9 and spend a lot of time on the Internet.
That being said i hooked up my ethernet cord to it and for the life of me i can not figure out how to get online in os9.
And you also said something about updating the firmware, how do i check the firm ware and if i do need to update it?
Look under the Apple > system profiler > production information. It should reat 4.1.9 f1 if it reads something like 3.0 something it needs to be up dated.
Do i need a internet conection to update the firmware?
It would help it's not necessary but can be a pain without it. I have a burned CD with the updater on it since I work with so many iMacs.
Look here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106877
And do i need to start new questions for these?
It would allow more people to see your post. Often things posted at the bottom of a "solved" post will get ignored.
I was also looking at HD on ebay
Hard Drive??
and some had osx already installed. Is that a good idea and if yes how do i know if my machine will run the version i get?
You wouldn't. These iMacs will run on 10.4.11 with enough RAM installed. At least 512.
I'd look for a Panther installer or a Tiger but they will have to be on CD since that's what your iMac came with.
Richard