Can't get beige G3 to boot from CD

Hey guys (and gals).
Here's hoping someone can help.

Ican't seem to get my old beige G3 to boot from a CD no matter what I do. Holding the traditional C down yields no results. OS 8.6 can't set the Starup Disk to the CD drive either due to an 'error'.

I've tried all combinations of the IDE configuration of the HD and CD (including the cd reader on its own) to no avail. I've even tried reseting the ROM with the SET-DEFAULTS command in the Open-Firmware and still nothing.

I've tried booting to a 10.2 OSX disk as well as a PPC linux one and the CD drive just seems to get ignored!

Any suggestions? I'm at my wit's end...

Thanks!

have you tried going into system preferences>startup disk and selecting the cd as the startup disk?

Macman said:

have you tried going into system preferences>startup disk and selecting the cd as the startup disk?

Click to expand...

I assume that's an OSX reference (I have OS 8.6 installed), but i have tried going to the Startup Disk control panel and selecting the CD. Upon the reboot the machine boots off the HD anyway, ignoring the CD-booting request.

oops, sorry. if the machine is booted up, and you insert a disc, does it show up on the desktop or anything, or is it just ignored?

No problem!

No, the drive seems to be working fine! The CDs are getting mounted on the desktop without any problems.

I can even try launching the OSX installer from within the OS, but the problem is that it tries to set the boot device to CD and it fails with 'an error occured'...

The only logical ( ? ) thing I can think of (obviously disregarding any ROM/firmware anomalies) is that the old macs are only able to boot from CD if an Apple CD drive is used, which is not the case here (the original drive died years ago, all the tests are being done with old and new PC CD/DVD readers/writers).