Power mac g4 MDD doesn't recognize any CD when booting with C depressed

Hi, I purchased this Power Mac Mirror Door Drive about a month ago on e-Bay. It came with OS 10.4.8 installed, no CD's for OS 10 and a CD with an Orange 9 containing OS 9.2.1. OS 9 was not installed on the machine. I have PhotoShop and Quark that require OS 9. I have tried to follow all your discussions on installing OS 9, keeping OS 10.4.8 intact, but so far this machine will not recognize any bootable CD. The best I've gotten so far is the machine placed one of the attempts on the desk top as an empty CD. I have tried to boot holding down the C key, booted in safe mode, have tried bootable OS 10.2.1 CD's, have tried bootable Software restore CD's (set of four CD's) with OS 9.2.2, Power Mac G4 OS 9.2.2 Install CD, eMac OS 9 Install CD, iMac OS 9 Install, all Gray Labels. So far nothing works. I live on a lake in TN and if this thing wasn't so expensive it would have been a boat anchor by now. I don't have any way to reload OS 10.4.8 or I would try to reformat one of the hard drives and start over. Apple told me that I need the same disks that were shipped with the machine and that they would cost me $180 delivered to my home. But that puts me back to OS 10.2.1 and then I would have to purchase OS 10.4.8 again. How can I get Classic to load on this machine? The CD drive will load a music CD, or a DVD, or a blank CD-R just fine.
Thanks,
Tony

Tony,
The set of 6 restore CD's certainly sound like they're from the right era. The part numbers are very close to those for my MDD, which was on sale at the same time as your dual 867MHz. I have varying numbers from 691-3545-A to 691-3548-A, 691-3600-A (for restore CD 4). The two OSX install CD's come with 691-3956-A and 691-4081-A. All my CD part no's are prefixed with Z, for International English.
Unfortunately the MDD's (at the time of your dual 867MHz MDD and my dual 1GHz MDD came with 4 restore CD's and two OSX install CD's. To get OS9 installed, it would need to be the right restore CD for the Mac.
Unless you're up for a bit of trickery. At no cost. All you need to be able to do is use the three Unix commands "cp", "ls" and "cd".
With the Mac booted up into OSX, open up a Terminal session, make the window bigger if you want. Insert the first PMG4 restore cd.
In Terminal:
Go to the /Volumes directory (cd /Volumes).
List the directories found there (ls -la)
Two will be the internal disks (20G and 60G if I remember). One will be for the Restore cd (probably called "Restore CD" or something.
go into the "Restore CD" directory. (cd Restore*) Note, if you try 'cd Restore CD', it will error, you would need double-quotes round a directory name with spaces in it, ie. cd "Restore CD".
List the directory contents (ls -la)
In there is a '.images' directory, which contains disk images, including one of OS9. You can't see this folder in the Finder.
Go into the .images directory (cd .images)
List the directory contents (ls -la)
There should be an OS9General.dmg disk image.
You will need to copy this to a directory that you can read (cp OS9* ~/).
It's a 300MB+ file, being copied from cd, so it may take 4-5 minutes.
Now in the Finder:
Go to your home directory.
There should be an OS9General.dmg disk image there. You can mount this.
It should have (fingers crossed) a usable OS9 System Folder (and OS9 Applications Folder) that you can use. Copy it to your startup disk. You may have to play around with the System/Finder to get the folder blessed. Then see if you can select it in the OSX Startup Disk system pref. Try a reboot if you feel brave.
I would go through all the other Restore CD's, just like above, looking for useful stuff you can install.
All this means nothing of course, if there are no OS9 drivers installed on the startup disk. But with two disks installed (and other Macs to hand) you should be able to reformat one of the disks (from within OSX) installing OS9 drivers.
Perhaps someone knows of a way to get OS9 drivers installed without having to reformat. I'm sure it can be done, but I have no experience of doing it.
Note, you're still left without an OS9 startup cd, but if all goes well, you're back in OS9. And there would be nothing to stop you putting an OS9 System Folder on each disk.
Let us know what you decide / do.

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Note 1: shut-down is same as pulling the power plug.
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