Great Suggestions from everyone. I really appreciate it.
I have pretty much determined that the CDRW drive is bad. When I unplug it's data cable the machine boots right to the question mark folder screen, there is no 15 minute delay, it is at that screen in probably less than a minute.
I do have a firewire case that is made for hard drives, I hooked an apple branded working cdrw/dvd read only drive to it and hooked it up via firewire to the iMac and it would not recognize the firewire drive when I booted holding the option key, nothing showed up. I guess that firewire case can not recognize the optical drive because it was not recognized by my G5 either. It does work fine with hard drives.
I got this G3 machine for free, I was kind of hoping to set it up for my mom, she is older and does not currently have a computer. I think I may just give this one away to someone who wants to work on it or send it to the electronics recycler if no one around here wants it. (I am in St. Louis MO, any takers?)
I do have one more idea, I have a Powermac G4 dual 450 running 10.4.11 and I just picked up a PowerMac G5 1.6 running Leopard 10.5.8. Is there any way I could use either of these machines and put the hard drive I want to put in the iMac G3 in it and load the OS on the drive then install it in the iMac. I am thinking that this would not work. I don't really want to spend any money on this old machine. I may just give her my old G4, I just picked the G5 up last week and have switched back to Mac from my Windows based notebook. I certainly missed using OS X on a daily basis. I wish I could buy a new MacBook, but it just isn't in the budget!
If there is any way I could load the OS from another computer please let me know. Would Firewire target mode be any help? Somehow I don't think so.
Thanks for all of your advice and counsel. take care, Kevin -- You received this message because you are a member of the iMac Group, a group for those using Apple iMacs and eMacs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/imac/list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to imaclist@googlegroups.com To leave this group, send email to imaclist+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/imaclist
