this is a beige g3 it doesn't even boot when I hold down the c key
That is troubling. Macs have supported that feature since they first included CDROM drives. Are you trying to boot with an original OS 8 or 9 install disc? It is difficult to get none-OEM optical drives to support booting. I am hoping your DVD drive is an *addition* and not a *replacement* for the original CDROM? If not, you may need to put in the old CDROM drive, at least temporarily. Then again, it may be that the startup keys are not recognized and the real obstacle is that you need to get hold of an ADB keyboard for the hold-down-c-key to be recognized. More miscellaneous notes on this subject follow. Target disk mode is supported only on Macs that originally shipped with FireWire. It is a hardware thing. Connecting to another Mac booted in target disk mode from the Beige G3 with FireWire card should work fine, but doesn't help with installing OS X since the process is more complicated than drag and drop. X Post Facto helps get around this problem. As a point of interest, the SCSI equipped PowerBooks performed a similar trick, acting as an external drive, but one needed a special cable to invoke the feature. Even if the OS X disc boots, it will refuse to install on unsupported hardware. Still, one really wants to be able to boot from an OS 9 CDROM as a way to do maintenance. The way I have gotten drives formatted for older hardware is to temporarily put the drive in a supported tower. Such a technique won't work using a Mini!
