I. Hate. Computers.
Looking at my to-do list, I could get to work on the résumé or I could install OS X for David.
I made the wrong choice.
Backed up his files to a partition on the other hard drive, no sweat. (Can even boot from that partition, as I learned a bit later.) Popped CD into drive. Double-clicked icon. Whir, whir, whee.
Except that for no adequately-explored reason, the machine is categorically refusing to start itself from a CD-ROM drive. Startup Disk doesn’t work. The OS X restart gizmo calls Startup Disk, which as I just mentioned, doesn’t work. Restarting and holding down C almost works—the drive whirs and I get a big gray apple on my screen—but not quite, as the big gray apple will sit there for all eternity if I let it. Using my external CD burner instead of the internal CD drive makes no difference whatever.
This? Sucks. Am reinstalling OS 9 at present, see if that fixes it.
I. Hate. Computers.
ETA: Didn’t. Help, that is. And now I’ve hosed one of his OS 9 partitions. Just as well the cats don’t understand my language; they’d pick up terrible habits.
ETA II: Aha. Back in business. But I still hate computers.
ETA III: Oh, [deleted]. The lovely video-card bug in which the Mac does not actually send any information to the monitor is back in action. I’ve never found a cure for this except forty billion restarts; after the forty-billion-and-first, the Mac suddenly realizes it has a monitor again.
Have I mentioned that I hate computers?