Trying to update beige G3 to OSX 10.2 without DVD drive

Question

I have a beige 233 mhz G3 that my elderly mom is using with a dial-up modem. It has OS 9.2, and just keeps chugging along nicely. I wanted to try upgrading it to OS X 10.2 so my mom would have some of the advantages of X, but without success.
Problem is, the OS X disks are DVDs and the G3 only has a Cd-rom.
I tried burning the installer to CDs using Toast, but it didn't work (wasn't bootable, apparently). After wasting about 10 Cds on this effort (tried various suggestions on the internet for making bootable copies of OS X installers--nothing worked), out of desperation I tried this:
So, I took out the 20 GB hard drive I wanted to use in the G3, and installed it as a slave in my own G4 desktop. Then I reformatted & partitioned the 20GB drive, and installed OS 10.2 on the 7.9 GB partition. Rebooted, and it worked. Then I took it out, reset its jumpers as a Master, and put it back in the beige G3.
No joy. The G3 booted from the original 4 GB drive on OS 9 (even
though I had set the jumpers as a slave). So I took out the 4GB drive, but it kept giving "can't open" error messages across the top of a white screen and kept restarting but wouldn't boot.
Can anyone tell me if this can be done without spending more money, or should I abandon the effort?

Answer 1

I do not know of any "Full Retail" discs containing 10.2 on DVDs. My Impression was that a few 10.3 Panther discs were DVDs, and all "store-bought" "Full Retail" discs for 10.4 Tiger were DVDs, but there were CD exchange programs available for legitimate (e.g., non-eBay) purchases. 10.4 Tiger DVDs other than "Full Retail" all appear to be computer-model specific.
If you are trying to install anything other than 10.2 Jaguar, the following does not apply.
What you have described should work for Mac OS X 10.2, but there are a few places it could get derailed. First, your PRAM backup battery must be strong to maintain the parameters while you are experimenting. Unless you have changed it recently, it is likely to be dead.
Some drives have different strap settings for Master with Slave present and Master without Slave. The make and model of the drive would help determine whether your drive is such a drive. Early models of the beige G3 do not support Master/Slave on one cable, but they shipped with cables for single drives. Are these the original everything including cables?
If you could boot to the Mac OS X 10.2 Install CD (which you said you cannot) you could choose Disk Utility from the Installer menu rather than Installing. This would allow you to check the Hard Drive for Integrity AND set the Startup Disk using Mac OS X.
If you can boot Mac OS 9 with both drives present, you could Set Startup to the Hard Drive and System with Mac OS X on it. (This requires 9.2.1 or a downloaded Startup Disk Control panel -- older versions of Startup Disk Control panel do not know anything about Mac OS X). You could also use OS 9 Disk First Aid to do a cursory check of the drive. Mac OS X extends the OS 9 directory organization with additional data structures, but gross errors on the Hard Drive could be detected.