iMac over. Borkness=very yes.

So it all started last night when I decided to wipe my G3 iMac’s hard drive and start fresh. It wasn’t running all that poorly, but the hard drive was almost full and had three years worth of stuff installed and partially deleted (haxies, applications, etc...). I backed everything up to my iPod and iBook, popped in the OS 9 CD, and erased the hard drive. I installed OS 9.2 and 10.0 off of the disks that came with the computer. Then I popped in the System Restore disks to restore the applications that came with the computer. Little did I know that System Restore wiped the hard drive in the process. “Oh well, that’s OK,” I said to myself. “No problem.” That is, until Software Restore choked while reading the last disk and quit. Eek.

I went back to the regular OS 9.2 install disk. I Installed OS 9.2. No problem. I installed Panther off of my 10.3 CDs. No problem. The computer worked fine until I decided to reinstall software I backed up to the iBook. Finder hung. I forced quit, thinking that, at worst, I’d end up with a partial file transfer and would just have to do it again.

This is when things really started falling down. After the Finder relaunched, I opened the Applications folder to see what copied and what didn’t. The Applications folder was empty. Thinking it was just a bug in the Finder, I clicked on another item in the sidebar then clicked on the applications folder again. It was empty. Relaunch Finder.  Applications folder still empty. Try to launch System Preferences. Dock hangs. Finder becomes non-responsive. Force restart. iMac takes ten minutes to boot to the Dock and desktop. The Finder never starts. I restart and run fsck.  I give up for the night.

This morning, I ran the AppleCare CD that came with the AppleCare warranty. TechTool--powerful tool, but slow as molasses and a little scary. I ran some disk tests. TechTool finds some error with the file structure. It repairs it, but eliminates 80,000 files in the process! Needless to say, when I tried booting OS X off the hard drive again, it had a kernel panic (or as it said: “panic: we are hanging here...").

Mount off Panther CD. Erase disk, zero all data. Try to install OS 9 again. OS 9 CD won’t mount. Try to install Panther. Panther installer hangs at the “select your language screen.” Try to install Jaguar. Installer tells me it encountered errors and could not install the OS.

Crap.

That’s basically where I am now, except I was able to mount the iMac’s hard drive on my iBook via Firewire Target Disk Mode. I tried to install OS 9 on it from my iBook, but I couldn’t since I don’t have an OS 9 install on my iBook and therefore unable to run Classic (OS 9 was not installed on my iBook G4 1.2 GHz when I got it--if someone can tell me how I would go about installing OS 9 so I can use Classic, let me know!). The iMac hard drive is OK according to Disk Utility on my iBook.

So this is where I stand now. Help!

In other news, I got extra RAM for my iBook. Unfortunately I can’t install it; I don’t have a small enough screwdriver to remove the RAM shield. At least I can use my iBook. For now…