Artie,
I'm glad you've posted again today. Your previous post - "relatively uninteresting" and "uncaptivating" I found quite hurtful. WRT the thread title and the possibility that others going down the same trail as me might not locate this thread, there's always the Search function. I get the overwhelming majority of my help/research needs on the Apple Support site and forums nowadays and usually find what I want by using Search rather than scrolling down pages of not-exactly-titled threads. I also can't help thinking that if any of the Mods had had a problem with the title they would have dealt with it by now.
Did I try to boot into OS9? Of course. It was the very first thing I did. How else would I know that it would not boot into OS9?
Anyway, as I said in my previous post, this pursuit of OS9 has now come to an end.
You might be faintly interested to hear that last night I had a blinding moment of realisation, aka The Penny Drops. I just wish I had had this epiphany a year ago; it would have saved a great deal of time, effort and money. The only software I need to buy (and it has now been ordered; I found a vendor on the net) is AppleWorks. AppleWorks 6.4 is both PowerPC and Intel installable; AND will read all the current ClarisWorks files including the vital customer database. Therefore I could use it on the two Intel iMacs AND the two PowerPc G4s if necessary. Since by then they'll all be running OSX they will finally all talk to each other as they should.
The blinding moment of realisation was thus: "It's not the processor, it's the operating system!".
So therefore I'm going to keep the MDD, especially since I now know how to change the admin password without which I couldn't load any new s/w.
And if that don't work I'll cross that bridge then. I am very determined. I have to be!
