IMAC G3 233mhz - New internal HD install problem

[Sacsurfer1]

I am working on an IMAC G3 233mhz, 4gig HD. I decided to up the HD from a 4 gig to a 40 gig. I removed the orig 4gig drive and connected the new 40gig Seagate drive. Put the IMAC back together, booted to an OS X 10.1 Install CD (also tried this with 8 and 9 system CD's with same problem) and created a new partition and then installed the system software. The system see's the new HD, I can install from the new system CD (8, 9 or X, all 3 will install to drive) But when the system is rebooted after the sucsess full install The ? mark folder blinks untill I put any OS CD in and let it boot from CD. The system boots from CD, the drive is listed on the desktop, I can open the drive, the system I just installed is on the drive, I can even go into startup disk and pick the HD as start up drive but when I reboot it wont or cant boot from the new HD drive.

PLEASE HELP! This is driveing me crazy

[nixgeek]

You might need to play with the jumpers on the drive. If it's set to CAble Select, change it to Master.

[Texas Mac Man]

Several Questions.

Did you update the iMac's firmware before installing OS X? You have to do the update using OS 9. See http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86117

Why are you using X10.1? This is an out-of-date operating system. You should probably use Panther, 10.3.9. Was the 10.1 install CD that you were using a universal/retail CD, or one from another model Mac?

How much RAM do you have? The OS X specs say 256MB min, but you really need at least 512MB.

Cheers, Tom

[Sacsurfer1]

The CD-Rom unit is set to master and I have tried changeing it to slave and that causes the system to not see either drives and cable select does not make a diff. The CD-rom was set to master orig and the HD was set to slave. I thought all drives needed to be set to cable select in order for the system to assign them correctly.

[Sacsurfer1]

I did download the firmware and when I ran it it said the firmware was current and I did not need it. I have tried installing all the OS X ver and all will install onto the drive but will not boot from drive after install. As to the CD's I am useing they are not copies they are orig CD's just not sure what they are for or from. I have tried several diff CD's of the same OS's and same problem.
The system has 98 megs SDRAM now (I took out the 256 chip I added to make sure the new chip was not causeing the problem).

Would a lower amount of memory cause this problem? The system ran fine with X installed and 98 megs ram on the 4 gig drive.

Also...when I tried to install X on the 20 gig it gave me a msg some thing to the effect "Drive is over the 8 gig limit" and it would not use the drive.

[Texas Mac Man]

On older G3s, you cannot install OS X on a hard drive or partition larger than 8GB. So you need to partition the hard drive, with the first partition having a size of 7.9GB. OS X must be installed on this partition.

You don't have enough RAM installed to run OS X.

Unless the install CDs are retail versions or versions specifically for your iMac, you are wasting your time.

Cheers, Tom