I made a bootable PPC version of the Ubuntu distro for an old Bondi Blue G3 iMac that I've got, and when I try to boot off of the cd, I hold down C while the computer is booting and it gives a bluish/grey screen for about 8 seconds and then has the mac questionmark folder and sits on that for as long as I leave the power on. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, the keyboard and all that works otherwise.

The only thing that I have done to the computer is replace the original 4 gig hard drive with a 30 that has no OS on it. The original 4 gig had OS 8.2 on it, if that helps at all.

Someone with some experience in this please help me out here, I would appreciate it very much.

The folder with the question mark means that the mac cannot find a valid drive to boot from.

The procedure you are using (holding the c key down during boot) is the correct way to force the iMac to boot from the cd.

Could it be a keyboard problem? The early iMac keyboards are notoriously crappy.

If you could borrow a Mac boot cd from someone, maybe you could find the problem. Otherwise, you could try putting the old drive back in (yes, I know how much of a pain it is to swap hds on bondi iMacs ).

Good luck

ok, I'll try that, a friend of mine has Panther on cd, so I'll borrow that, but should it be a problem that I swapped drives?

The drive that I took out was a Quantum Fireball SE 4 gig and I replaced it with Quantum Fireball SE 30 gig, no difference otherwise.

If that doesn't work I'll grab a usb keyboard from somewhere and see if I can get that to work with it.

Thanks for the info!

Sounds like a good plan. My only concern about booting panther is that OS X is ram hungry. It will hardly run on 128 Mb, runs okay on 256, fine on 512, loves 1 Gb (I'm currently on a Tibook with 1 Gb). But, just being able to boot from the cd should tell you if the cd drive is ok.

The hd should be fine, I just didn't know if you had a working copy of Mac OS available.

Cheers,

Ok, so I just got my Ubuntu PowerPC cds in the mail and everything works like a charm, its installing as I speak.

Seems that the real problem that I was having was a couple of bad burns of the isos. So its no worries from now on.

Thanks for the help with all of that!