Trouble installing OS9

[syc0]

Hi,
I've just got a lovely Power Mac 5500/275 (the black one with built-in TV card, ). I believe it had been returned as faulty. When I got it, it was showing a floppy disk with a question mark. I figure it was the hard disk, so I used a start-up disk and ran Disk First Aid. This failed complaining of a read error, even though I could access files. So I initialised the drive and everything seems fine.

The machine was running OS9, but as the original CDs had been thrown away, I got a CD image of the OS9 install CD . The problem is, I don't have access to a Mac with a cd writer, so I had to write it on my PC. I tried using dmg2iso and Transmac to burn the DMG, but my mac wouldn't let me boot from either. I tried holding 'C' and Cmd+Opt+Shift+Del, but neither worked. So I tried using a 8.5 startup disk to install it, as the OS9 installer needs at least 8.5, but that failed with an error. I then tried copying the System Folder from the CD-ROM to the hard disk, but that also didn't work.

So is there any other way of getting the OS onto the hard disk? Or maybe there's another way of forcing the mac to boot from CD? Or somehow manually installing it?

Thanks

 

[mklos]

It sounds like the hard drive is failing on you. I would try putting a different drive in there. Small drives are cheap on eBay. Just get one, throw it in and see what it does. If you do get on on eBay, its probably formatted for FAT32, so you'll need to re-initialize it for HFS, or HFS+. I would try putting OS 8.6 on it as a start. If OS 8.6 gets on a new drive then try putting OS 9 on it. I don't think Mac OS 9.2 will work on that computer so I wouldn't even try that. I would also have a at least of 64MB of RAM to run Mac OS 9.

 

[syc0]

Thanks for the reply. But surely a failed hard disk wouldn't stop the CD from booting? Even if I replaced it I'd still have the problem of getting Mac OS on it. I'm going to give OS8 a try aswell though anyway.

I don't see why it wouldn't run OS9, it has a 275mhz CPU. It takes standard DIMMs aswell, so I can upgrade the RAM for a low cost.