My daughter has an original iMac...

I want to clean it up, and upgrade from OS8.6 to OS9.1

The CD drive operates erracticly, speeds up, slows down, makes noise...usually we have to remove the cd with the paper clip tool...

While we can usually, but not all the time, load programs with this drive, it is not consistant and we don't rely on it very much...

I bought an Iomega USB CD-RW and was able to install the software for it thru the original CD drive...

The original CD drive works well enough to give me about a 50-70% success rate when installing programs, but we don't rely on it...

Now I want to upgrade the OS...

I booted the iMac up from the HD into OS 8.6...

First time using the original CD drive and the OS 9.1 CD, I got lots of disk errors, so I used Norton's and did a scan disk and it fixed everything, according to Norton...

2ed attempt I used the OS 9.1 CD with the Iomega CD drive, got lots of disk errors and again used Norton's, but this time Norton said there were NO errors...

I tried again using the original CD drive, lots of errors, but Norton said the HD was ok...

Next I tried to boot from the CD by holding the "C" key down from each drive, tried the original drive first then the Iomega drive, and from the Iomega drive it will not boot from the CD...from the original CD drive it will go into it's speed up, slow down, make noise and will not boot from the CD either...

I tried the original system restore cd that came with the iMac and same results...

I booted up to OS 8.6 and opened the system restore CD, and tried to initialize the HD but I get the message "Can't initialize the startup disk"...I did this from each drive with same results...

At this point I don't know what to do...

I would like to do on the iMac the same as I can do on a PC...Boot from a floppy, fdisk, reformat and reinstall my OS...

I'm a good tech on pc's, but not iMac's...

How do I solve this problem???

thanx
Steve

email me if you wish

Never mind!!!...I got it...
I was able, after several more tries, able to do a clean install of the original OS 8.6, then I got 9.1 on...

Everything seems ok
Steve

Steve,

Uh.......why did you do a clean install of
8.6 only to install 9.1 right after? Why
didn't you just boot from the 9.1 CD,
initialize the drive (drive setup) and install
9.1? So now you have BOTH O/S's
loaded..not a good thing my friend. If you
truly did a CLEAN INSTALL of 9.1 then
toss the OLD SYSTEM FOLDER. (and,
btw, the 9.2.2 update is free!).