I have a Imac (Not sure what the model is but it has 450mhz, 256mb ram, 40gig HD)and i was runing OS 9.1 on my Imac and then i decided to get OSX, without testing the hardware i installed OS X and didn't have a problem for a few days. Then one day as the Imac was on sleep i tried to get it back but couldn't so i restarted and then the screen was all dark and grey. After this i tryed to zap the Pram on it but all it did was make it completly pitch black. Any ideas?? Cheers, Jay

Can you see the screen at all? If not I dought it is a software problem and more likely a problem with the iMacs monitor. If you can see the screen and it is dim, boot in 9.X and go into control panels: monitors. Then adjust the brightness/contrast from with-in there.

There was a firmware issue with the imac and it needed to be installed prior to osx. With that said, see if you can boot from your os9 cd, it it does, then try to select your os9 system (if you still have one) as the startup and update your firmware, then try to reinstall osx. On a slightly different note, the pram battery, when bad, can cause the same bad monitor symptom. Good Luck.

Umm i got rid of OS 9 as i formated the drive arr.. Well now its pretty dim i can't hardly see a thing. So how do you pram the battery? Cheers

Thats right, I forgot on those machines and others if the battery went dead then the screen would'nt come back on after a restart or shutdown. But this is not the case if you say it's just dim. The command to clear te PRAM is Command, Option, P, R. Hold all of them down at startup (soon as the machine is powered on) and wait fo rht emac to restart itself. BTW You should always hold on to your OS 9 CD's and always have it loaded, personaly it is much more usable than OS-X :)

To "replace" the PRAM battery you have to take the cover off where the RAM goes and it is housed in a small black container on the side. The fit is tight os hope you have small fingers,unless you want to take the case off.