G4 Won't Reboot Normally

[airways]

We use our old G4 solely to opearte our large flatbed scanner which requires us to switch back and forth from OS X and OS 9.2 (the latter to comply with the scanner software). Yesterday after scanning for a while I selected OS X as the startup disk and rebooted. It failed to boot up normally and now I have the following displaying:
'etc/master.passwd: not a directory
'etc/master.passwd: not a directory
'sh:/etc/profile: not a directory
'sh-2.05b#

I considered using the original bootup disk to get around this issue but can't get the tray to open to even try this idea.

Any siggestions?

 

[bobw]

See if This helps.

 

[airways]

Thanks bobw that got me, or rather, the G4 back into the land of the living. I now just have to recreate the missing /tmp link then all should be back to "normal".