Thanks for your help, I think what i'll try next is booting some other iMacs with this cd. We have a at least 10 of these G3's at my school, maybe one of those will work.
I did try selecting the cd as the startup disk in system prefs, but when I clicked restart is just 'dinged' at me which I guess means it didn't want to.
The disk is supposed to be a retail 9.2.1 disk.
I have a iMac G3 with the following specs:
500 MHz G3
1GB ram
80GB HD
DVD-ROM drive
Firmware 4.1.9f1
Currently has OS X 10.4.11 installed
Hard drive does have OS 9 drivers installed
I'm trying to install OS 9. I have what is supposed to be the bootable disc, but no matter what I do...