Hi,
So I am fairly new to these iMac G3's and recently got one where the drive was wiped and I found a Mac os 9 disc on Macintosh garden and burned it to a CD. I put it into the iMac and it seems like it wont read it but it will spin up. I've tried to use target disc mode as well holding down the option key and still nothing. I thought it could be the iMacs keyboard so I swapped it out for a newer one and still nothing. I have a OSX disc i could try but not sure how to eject the Mac OS 9 disc from the iMac if it keeps going to the folder icon.

Before doing anything, first try holding down the "C" key to boot from the optical drive. If that doesn't work, then, try holding down the mouse button at boot. That should, hopefully, cause the disc to be ejected.

If all else fails, and you have a USB 3.5" IDE hard drive enclosure handy, extract the drive, then connect it to a G3 or G4 PowerMac that is fully functional and running Mac OS 8.1 through 9.2.2. Format the drive as HFS+ in Drive Setup, then transfer the System Folder from the working Mac's drive to the iMac's drive. Use that to boot it, then you can install 9.x, without having to boot from CD.

>> Volvo242GT said:

Before doing anything, first try holding down the "C" key to boot from the optical drive. If that doesn't work, then, try holding down the mouse button at boot. That should, hopefully, cause the disc to be ejected. If all else fails, and you have a USB 3.5" IDE hard drive enclosure handy, extract the drive, then connect it to a G3 or G4 PowerMac that is fully functional and running Mac OS 8.1 through 9.2.2. Format the drive as HFS+ in Drive Setup, then transfer the System Folder from the working Mac's drive to the iMac's drive. Use that to boot it, then you can install 9.x, without having to boot from CD. Click to expand...

I later tried a 9.2.2 disc and it worked but tried to install mac os 10.3 and its asking for a firmware update. Where can i locate that?

Either the Macintosh Repository or the Macintosh Garden should have that listed.

Looks like this is the one you need: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/24108-imac-g3-firmware-update-4-1-9

-J