Removing Mac OS X remains

Hello,

First of all, I'm new to the forums and to the whole world of Mac's. I just got my first Mac, a second hand Beige G3. This thing had Mac OS X 10.2.8 installed on it, but it was just to slow to work. Because of that I installed Mac OS 9.0.4 (I plan on upgrading it to 9.2.2 as soon as I get my USB card).

The big problem now is that when it boots, it takes 30 seconds to start the monitor, and then another 30 seconds in which it says "Cannot find a bootable HFS+ volume".

After that it does boot Mac OS 9, but I was wondering if I could at least get rid of the "Cannot find a bootable HFS+ volume" message.

Any help is appreciated.

When you used the OS 9 install disk, did you first reinitialize or reformat (can't remember the terminology 9 uses) the hard drive to make everything related to OS X disappear?

If not, the simplest would be to run the 9 installer again, this time reinitializing, before you gather too much stuff on your disk to make the process easy.

I have initialized it with OS X, OS 9 and again with OS 9. I am currently running it with another harddisk that I just removed from my Linux machine with exactly the same message, so I doubt it is a problem with the harddisk.

I remember that at one point, installers included the option of formatting for HFS as well as HFS+. But I can't recall whether by the time OS 9 was current, that option remained.

If so, maybe the disk is formatted as HFS only (though why that would cause the delay is beyond me).

I do know that I got that option, and I believe I choose Mac OS Standard (guessing that is HFS), just checked and it is Mac OS Extended. I just removed the battery for quite some time (about 30 minutes) and know the 30sec monitor initialisation time is gone. The Mac OS X "Cannot find bootable HFS+ drive" is still there.

The disk is formatted as Mac OS Extended.

Well, after one reboot the initial delay is back, it is a little bit shorter, about 15sec now. Also, the error message has changed to "can't OPEN: " which is repeated for 30sec.

EDIT: When I press 'c' while booting up, I don't get the Mac OS X remains saying it can't open <something>.

I believe I found the solution:

http://davespicks.com/writing/soyawanna/getridoften.html

All it took was to get so mad about the issue that I searched for "get rid of Mac OS X" on Google, and this site popped out. I'm going to try it now.

Well, SystemDisk works like a charm. The trick is this:
- Download SystemDisk from above site;
- Extract and mount it;
- Run SystemDisk and select that you want to boot from your harddrive (not OpenFirmware);
- I warns you that it isn't completly supported and that you should check the Startup Disk controlpanel, just click ok;
- Finally, check the Startup Disk controlpanel and reboot your Mac.

Everything is fine now, except the long delay before my screen inits. But I suppose a new thread is a better place to ask that.