Help me with my iMac Classic..

[Cheese]

MACRUMORS ROCKS! Having said that, let me first begin by telling anyone reading this that this is not a test, or a joke. I have an iMac DV400, 320mb RAM running OS 10.2.5 and Safari Beta 2. Yesterday I changed my startup disk to OS9.2 (Classic) in order to access Faxfts6 so that I could send some resume's for the wife. After remanipulating a few brain cells to remember how to do this, I successfully sent two faxes. I then went to the control panel and selected startup disk, then selected the disk where OSX resides. Then I clicked on restart. The lockdown that resulted was my fault entirely, but I want to know a few things:
1. What should I have done to prevent this from happening in the first place?
2. What is the best way to recover from this type of problem?
3. Is it possible for me to do a clean install of OS10.2 from CD without loading in OS9.2, (and what would it affect other than not being able to run classic apps) and if so, is there anything I will need to know in order to accomplish it? I really appreciate all of the cool people and all of the help that I have come to rely on at Macrumors. Thank you.

 

[mmmdreg]

so the box froze after clicking restart?
if so:
Q1/it shouldnt have locked in the first place
Q2/just hold the power button down. if you want to select a disk on startup, hold down <option> when it is starting. If by "recover" you mean AFTER you've restarted, you could always run a disk utility to check for errors that occurred due to the false restart.
Q3/You can very well not have OS9.x installed to be able to install OSX. To rephrase, yes you can install OSX without OS9. It makes no difference really apart from the "classic" issue that you mentioned. I don't have it installed right now but I plan to because my scanner is only for OS9. Anyhow, you could create like a small partition to set aside in the case you do want to install OS9 later on. This way you can reformat that particular partition when you no longer need it, saving you from reformating the OSX partition.
Anyway, I hope I've answered you questions.