Here is a strange problem. I had a hard drive go out on a old G3 Trayloading Imac. Customer is in love with this old machine so really wants it fixed. I put a new 40 GB drive in it (was the smallest new drive i could get). I boot to the OS9.2.2 disk. Run Drivesetup and initialize the drive. The new HD appears on the desktop and it sees it as it's full capacity. I run the Os9 installation. It then says it is finished. I reboot and it won't boot into OS9 just to a blinking questionmark folder. I did the thing again this time i made a 4 GB partition on the drive since that is the size of the driver it was replacing. Does the same thing will not boot into the OS even though it is fully installed.

...and check version of os cd installer, and requirements, check for latest update of firmware, check to make sure the format of drive is HFS+, not hfs, scan with disk first aid utility, install only apple system sofware, add extras later to avoid conflicts at this time, try booting with extensions off (hold down shift key) ... 6B 69 6C 72 6F 79 20 77 61 73 20 68 65 72 65

first check whether the hard drive has gone in as master or slave. make sure it doesn't conflict with the Optical Drive. You should ONLY be using 9.2.2 since it was the last 'nine' they made. the partition should be HFS + check your model against http://www.mactracker.ca/ database. Can you install 10.3 on it? much much better choice. at least for diagnostic purposes...