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According to Seagate you should have the 7 and 8 pins (those furthest from the power cable) jumpered to set the hard drive to master--in your ASCII sketch probably the pins you numbered 1 and 5.

If still not recognized, you may have to reset the PRAM (hold down cmd-opt-P-R during boot up and wait until the start up bong sounds a second time, then release). This will also do things like reset the system clock and other system settings to their factory defaults.

I think on Windows-type keyboards the "Windows" key is mapped as the Command key. The Alt key is equivalent to the Option key. The cmd-opt-P-R command should be alt-Windows-P-R, and, yes, you hold down both the P and R keys down.

BTW: there was never a G2 chip in Macs. If your iMac is one of the early "flavored" Macs like these then it has a G3 CPU. The Apple History site is a good place to get basic specs on just about every machine that Apple produced or licensed.

A PRAM reset should have set your iMac to its default settings and not affected the access to the CD player. Even if your iMac is now recognizing the hard drive, the iMac should eventually give up trying to read the hard drive and then go to the CD player to  try to boot up with its disk. Holding down the "C" key just pre-empts the hard drive read attempt and goes straight to the CD.

Sorry, but it beats me why you should have any problems booting with the CD. If you reboot then hold down the (left) mouse button then the Mac should eject the CD. This is just to check if the CD is OK (not that it's likely that you would develop any problems, but I'm pretty much stumped).

Sorry for the double post, but I felt if I didn't re-post what I just learned, you might not have thought that as a edit is not detectable unless you actually read...

Anyway, I spoke to a good friend who happens to be quite the tech person. He said to check the iMac's battery. So I did. The Maxell ER3S 3.6v Lithium Ion battery only had .002 volts left when I put it up to a multimeter. I'm not positive this would fix the problem, but this is what I've been told might.

Okay another problem, I went out and bought the battery ($10!) and put it in, I booted up and successfully installed Mac 8.6 to my new HDD! So I stay in this CD, and I got to install Apple Works and it says "Failed to Install, Drive Locked, Please unlock "iMac HDD" before you install again." Well everywhere I look I can't figure out how to unlock the drive... whatever that means.

So then another problem comes up. I figure, ah well, I'll leave the apps for later and just boot up, so I shut down the iMac, took out the disc, and turned on the iMac, to my dismay that flashing "?" and "Finder" logo inside the folder still happens! Even though I KNOW there is a system folder, cause when I boot from the CD, I see the HDD on the desktop, and I click it and all the stuff is there! So why won't it boot! Is this cause its locked? So how would I go about unlocking a drive?

Sorry, your problem with the "locked" drive still has me puzzled, and I failed to go pass that.

With Mac OS 9 and earlier sometimes you must "bless" the System Folder so that the Mac will recognize it as a bootable drive. Follow the instructions on this Apple document on reblessing a System Folder.

Don't dick with the PC. Boot from the CD and use Disk Utility to properly reformat the HD. If it doesn't work you've got a bum HD, or you need to recheck your jumper settings.

Also, if your iMac "G2" is as old as I think it is (it's actually a G3 - that refers to the CPU. There wasn't any G-Anything before the G3, oddly enough, and the first iMacs used G3 CPUs) you need to partition the drive. Put your system folder on the first partition (7.5GB or less.)

It will work with a single partition drive, and OS 9 will boot from any partition that STARTS in the first 8000000000 bytes of space, (but not X - OS X requires the boot partition to be completely contained in that space) but it's hit or miss in my experience. Better to just do it the safe way.

The partitioning of the hard drive into 8 GBs and the rest is required if and only if you will install Mac OS X on your iMac sometime in the future. If you are going to stick with OS 8 or 9, then you can set up the drive in a single partition.

D'Eyncourt wrote:

The partitioning of the hard drive into 8 GBs and the rest is required if and only if you will install Mac OS X on your iMac sometime in the future. If you are going to stick with OS 8 or 9, then you can set up the drive in a single partition.

And sometimes it'll refuse to boot. Mine did.

iBrandon - TCP/IP Control Panel.

Ymmv, but better safe than sorry, imho.