Can't boot up OS 9

[peytontodd]

My Mac G4 (mirror door) has 4 different operating systems on it: OS 9, 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5. It neatly lets me boot to any of the OS X versions by choosing it in System Preferences > Startup. However, when I just tried to do this with 9, instead of 9 booting up, I just got an icon of a floppy disk with a question mark in the middle of it. OS 9 is definitely in this Mac - the hard disk it's on was inherited from a previous Mac, and OS9 appears as one of the choices in the Startup dialog.

I assume from the icon that it wants me to insert the OS 9 CD, which I have, but I can't open the CD drive door. When I press (and hold) F12 nothing happens.

Is there a key I can press as I boot up the will give me the option to choose other OS's? If not, I may be stuck!

Thanks for your help!

And nice to have but not crucial: is there a way I can make OS 9 boot? Believe it or not there's one app I have that only runs on 9.

Peyton

 

[peytontodd]

I somehow remembered that one can hold down the mouse while booting. When I tried that, it opened the CD drive for me and I could put in the OS 9 CD, which enabled it to turn the floppy disk icon with question mark into a cute little Mac icon with a happy face. But then I saw them message "Sorry, a system error occurred: unimplemented trap. To temporarily turn off extensions, restart and hold down the shift key".

When I did that, I got a splash screen saying "Mac OS 9.2: Welcome to Mac OS, Extensions Off". So far, so good... but then the very same error message I just quoted appeared.

What now?

 

[drfranke]

Peyton,

I have the same system as you do. I also am trying to use a program in OS 9; I haven't used it since 2005. I need to edit a book in Quark 4.11 and when I switched to OS 9, I got a kernal panic. Did you figure out how to boot into OS 9? I tried holding the shift key and the mouse; still cannot boot into any OS.

Thanks, Jack

 

[richardtj]

hold down shift key, press power button and keep holding down shift key. Alternatively, boot into OS X, go into preferences pane- startup disk and select the OS you want to boot into