OS X Trouble

Ok, my morning was bad! I work on 3D animation and have an Blue and White G3 running OX 10.2.8.

I use classic a lot for older programs that I have not updated recently.

Anyway, I have a 15 gig HD which was almost full. So I went out and bought a 120 gig external drive. I coped about 3 gigs to the new drive when I realized I didn't format it properly. (It workds under OS X but not OS 9. So I copied everything back to my harddrive and tried to switch over to OS 9 to reformat the drive. On restart I get the question mark. I can't seem to get to 9 or X.

I've tried the little utlility on the OS X disk and it says nothing is wrong.

I'd be happy to just reinstall the System software but only if I could keep everythink on my HD but, there is not enough HD space to do this. I'd have to do a clean install and lose a ton of work.

What I really need is a disk to start from so I can dump the stuff I don't need and then reinstall OSX. But I can't get to anything.

HELP PLEASE!

Thank

Jeff

This should help

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106696

Thanks. Tried the X key and nothing happened.

1. Turn on or restart the computer.
2. Immediately press and hold the Option key. After a few seconds, the Startup Manger screen appears (Figure 1). The Startup Manager scans for available volumes.




Figure 1: Startup Manager screen

3. Optional: Clicking the circular arrow rescans for other volumes, including NetBoot Server volumes. You can eject any disc in the drive or open an empty tray-loading drive by holding down the Command (Apple) and Period (.) keys. The Command-Period key combination will also close the drive. After inserting a CD capable of starting up your computer, you could rescan for volumes.
4. Click the startup volume you want to use. In Figure 1, two startup volumes are available: a hard disk, and a CD-ROM disc. The volume's name does not appear.
5. Click the right arrow button to start up the computer from the volume you selected.

Thanks but I should have said I tried this as well. I even tried presetting the pram.

If you can get access to another Mac you can restart in Target Disk mode by holding down T...This will set your iBook up as a FireWire hard drive essentially. You plug your iBook into another mac via firewire and it will show up on the working mac as an extra hard drive which will allow you to remove all of your files

before attempting target disk mode, make sure you disconnect all firewire devices except the mac you want to use, and shut down the one youre trying to acces, then startup the main mac holding down command +T, then after that starts up, power on the ibook or secondary mac.

I thought it was just the t on boot up?

Is it command t?

Just T

Thanks all. I try that and hope for the best. While I'm asking, does anyone know of a good utlility program, such as Nortons?

Thanks again