[idahomacman]

I recently bought a used PowerMac G3 Blue & White off ebay. I got it really cheap because it came with no RAM or hard drive. As soon as it arrived, I popped my old 10 GB IDE hard drive and my RAM into it and tried to boot up. It gave me a flashing icon of a system folder with a question mark. I booted up from my OS 9.2.1 CD and it recognized the hard drive, and it even showed that the system folder on the hard drive was blessed, but it refused to boot up from that system folder. Since I only had OS 9.1 on the hard drive, I thought that if I installed 9.2.1 from the CD it might boot. However, the installer told me that I needed to update my firmware before it would let me install the system. I tried using the firmware updater, but it told me that I needed to have started up from an unlocked disk for it to work! So, I can't update my firmware until I can start from the hard drive, and I can't start from the hard drive until I update my firmware. What do I do?????
P.S. - I needed to network some files off of the hard drive last night, but I couldn't find my OS 9.2.1 CD, so I borrowed my friend's iMac restore CD with 9.2.1 and tried to start up from that. The mac got as far as the "Welcome to Mac OS 9.2" screen before freezing up and even giving me a bomb cursor! I found the original OS 9.2.1 CD, but now that CD does the same thing! What the heck is going on????

[Damien]

Put your old 10GB drive back into the computer and boot from it, assuming it still has a bootable OS on it.
Update your firmware. You can d/l it from Apple's Support site, Knowledge Base.

[idahomacman]

I can't boot from the hard drive! It has a bootable OS on it (it boots fine on my PowerBase) but it won't boot on the G3 unless I update my firmware! I can't update my firmware unless I boot from the hard drive!!
BTW, I got it to boot from the OS 9 CD again.

[Grant_G]

Perhaps you could put the drive back into the Power Base (nice ole computer BTW -- I had one) and then download the firmware update from Apple's site as Damien suggested. Then put the drive into the G3, boot from the CD and use the drive to update the firmware. Seems to me that it should work.
G

[Damien]

A ha! You've provided perhaps inadvertently a piece of information that tells me what the problem is (probably).
The HD's in the PowerComputing clones were formatted with an older version of FWB's Hard Disk Toolkit....so they have a driver on them that's not compatible with some versions of Mac OS 9 (9.1 or later, I think) and you'd have to either A) update your version of HDT or B) reformat the drive with Apple's HD Setup to put a compatible HD driver on the drive.
My bet is that you'll have to reformat your HD to get the Apple driver on the HD before you'll get the B/W G3 to boot from this HD.
Of course if you have a way to back up the data from this HD first, you should do that before reinitializing it.

[idahomacman]

Grant: I can't update the firmware unless I start from an unlocked drive.
Damien: The HD didn't come with the PowerBase. I bought it seperately and formatted it with Apple's utility on the OS 9 CD.

[Damien]

Hmm...
This is an IDE hard drive? Check the jumper settings on the drive to make sure that it's set as the Master device on your IDE bus. If the drive is set as a slave device, the computer is not going to be able to see the HD on the bus. Set the HD as Master or on Cable Select.
If you boot from a CD, does Hard Disk Setup see the hard drive?
What make/model HD is this? Are there any other devices on the IDE bus? I believe the B/W G3 IDE bus controls both the HD and the CD-ROM...