Hello everyone,

I recently bought a second hand iMac G3, 400MHz processor and 128mb ram, 10gb harddrive. I've always wanted a Mac just for the fun of it, and i finally got it. I dont think this imac is dead, but i'm having trouble on boot. It is not booting the traditional way, it is going down to firmware boot.

It gives this info:

MacOS: Boot Failure! (0xF3C481F6)
Mac OS: parcel initialization failure - bad checksum

Then i have 2 choices from the firmware for booting or shutting down 1. mac-boot command and 2. shut-down command.

So, i give it the mac-boot command; in starts showing the mac face for a few seconds, then it displays this message below of it:

/pci@f2000000/mac-io@17/ata-4@1f000/disk@0:5,\\:tbxi

after maybe a minute it finally displays the face and ? symbol; typical of not finding the system. Problem is that, even starting the imac with the system disc on it and pressing "c" at bootime, it still goes to the firmware thing...

Is there a way to tell the imac "hey dont boot at firmware, boot at cd!!" ??

Oh, by the way...during the "/pci@f2000000/mac-io@17/ata-4@1f000/disk@0:5,\\:tbxi" message I can still press the "alt" key and it shows me the retry arrow, the system harddrive labeled "Lorelai's comp", the system CD and the straight right arrow.... i try clicking on the harddrive and also on the CD icons to try to boot, but it only refreshes the screen changing from the traditional blue/purple background to a red-ish background and arrow/drive's buttons get funny colors...

i dont know what is going on....i dont think the imac is dead....i guess it has to do with that firmware booting default thing...

please help....
thanks in advance.