This one really has me in a bind...I've always had trouble getting my Beige G3 to boot once i started messing with OS X. I've done countless PRAM resets and had to reset everything in Open Firmware many many time. But now it's gone too far, and i don't know how to get this thing too boot without reinstalling the OS. (With OS X v10.2 on a 300mhz g3. / rev 1 motherboard, rev A ROM chip)

I booted off the OS X install CD and ran Disk Utility/First Aid to verify the hard disk. It checked the disk and reported everything's fine. So, I quit the installer and rebooted. But it rebooted back into the OS X CD, not the hard disk, so, this time around, after choosing restart, I ejected CD right away. But now upon reboot, all I have is a blinking question mark on the screen. It's not booting from hard disk anymore! I booted off the CD again and after quitting the installer, I read the Restart message and it says: "To start up using your current verions of the Mac OS, press the Option key when your computer restarts." So, this time I held down the Option key but it just keeps rebooting while the Option key's held down. Now, what's going on? How can I make my hard disk boot again?

I'm making a few assumptions about how i got into this situation...

1. installed OS X on a cleanly initialized hard drive WITHOUT installing the OS 9 Drivers --- therefore, when i boot into OS 9 using the OS 9 Installer CD, the hard drive isn't even visible :(

2. the beige G3 is an 'old world' machine --- therefore holding down the Option key has no effect on the boot process :(

3. for some reason, there is no Startup Disk option under the Installer menu when you boot from the OS X install CD :(

(i think the OS 9.1 Startup Disk control panel wouldn't recognize OS X System disks anyway, i think you need a newer version of the Startup Disk control panel)

4. booting into OF and resetting everything still doesn't work.

It seems the firmware on the beige G3 needs an HFS partition with the OS 9 drivers (not HFS+ partition) to get the boot loader working.

If anyone knows any open firmware tricks to get this working, please do tell :)

Otherwise, it looks like a reinstall of the OS (again)

Looks like you MAY have to do a reinstall. If you
do then take a little advise from someone who has
reinstalled the systems 9 an 10 many times on my
system till I go it perfect. Partition the drive with 2
partitions. Name one OS9 and the Other OSX.
Install 9 to the 9 drive and 10 to the X drive.
If you have to reinstall X again the 9 drive is
untouched and vise versa. I went one step further
and created 3 partitions OS9/OSX/WIN98. Turns
out that when the ever expanding Virtual PC drive
craps out you get some horrid error that even
Norton cannot fix. I keep it all by itself.

Boot off of a 9.2.1 Update CD and update the 9.1.
You should be able to see the OSX system via
9.2.1 but not if you initialized in UNIX format.

i had the same problem with my beige g3. make sure the hard drive jumper settings are correct. i tried many configurations with two 2 gig drives. finally i tried one drive, but osx wouldn't boot. i discovered that i had the drive on the second ide connector along with the cd rom drive. i put the hard drive on the primary cable, and osx booted and (sort-of) works fine and supports classic mode.