I was reinstaling my operating system on my Slot loading G3 when the internal CD drive broke. I had installed the OSX 10.2.8 partition so luckily had some functionality. I then tried to install OS 9.0 (original boot disk) onto a second partition on my hard drive. To do this I copied the disk to the OS X partition and created a disk image. I then set this disk image as the startup disc and rebooted. The system now boots from the disc image but says it cant load the OS as it is booting from a copy. It then gives me the option to restart. When restarted it tries to boot from the disk image and again gets stuck. I can't boot up from a CD since the drive is broken and I can't boot into OS X either! Any ideas greatfully apreciated.

well, why are you using a disk image? if you copy the OS9 system folder to the non osx partition proper it would work (you *did* format in HFS+..the unix FS is trouble trouble trouble IMHO and doesn't support classic anyways).. The image needs to be mounted by the OS you're booting into, which is clearly impossible, which is why your getting that loop , i think.

I did formatt in HFS+ but I'm not sure how to copy the OS 9 system folder to a non osx partition since it dosn't appear in the finder? Also I can't boot into OS X at the moment since I'm stuck in this loop of booting from the disk image. I've tried re'blessing' the OS X partition but the bless command dosn't seem to work when booting into open firmware