[jazzbum]

I've just bought my first Mac , a G4 running O.S X with O.S 9 also loaded , and after exploring O.S.X I asked it to startup using O.S 9 (because I wanted to download the freeware Protools which only runs in O.S 9). All I got was the icon of the monitor with the face on it in the middle of my screen. I can run O.S. 9 from the Restore CD , but can't find a way back into O.S X from there , or to tell the computer to startup from O.S X on the hard drive .(I don't have a disc for O.S X)
Hope someone can help , I was really enjoying my Mac experience .

[VegasACF]

You need to go to the Control Panel called "Startup Disk" (Apple Menu --> Control Panels --> Startup Disk) and select the OS X disk as the startup volume. Even though you (likely) only have one HD in your machine the two OSes will appear to be on different volumes.

After you select the OS X disk restart the computer and OS X should be the operative OS.

[jazzbum]

Thanks Vegas for your amazingly quick response , but O.S X doesn't appear in the startup menu , instead there's CEM which is the name the previous owner gave to the hard drive or partition containing O.S X and all the related applications etc. . I highlight CEM to say that's what I want to startup from , but there's no response . Do I need to find a way to explore CEM, to point the computer at O.S.X specifically , and if so how do I do that? Can O.S 9 read the contents of all the drives? Hope you can help , many thanks .

[VegasACF]

After you highlight the disk called CEM you should restart the computer (there may be a button in the Control Panel that does just that--I'm not at a Mac that's capable of booting into OS 9.x at the moment, so I'm going off my admittedly fuzzy memory). If there's not just go to the Special menu and select restart.

That should be all that is required.

If this doesn't work there's something screwy with your installation of OS X.

OS 9.x can "see" all the contents of all the drives, but if the document was created with an application that is only available in OS X (or is not backwards compatible with OS 9.x) then OS 9.x will not be able to do anything with it.

If the document is something that is OS-independent (a Word document [in most cases], a MIDI file, a text file, etc.) then you should have no problem.

If the document was created with an OS X-only application then you'll not have much luck with it in OS 9.x.

Best of luck. Let me/us know if you need further assistance!

EDIT: Another thing occurred to me for you to try, should the above not work. If, while the computer is shut down, you press and hold the "X" key while starting up (hold it until the computer starts booting into the OS) it should force OS X to be the startup operating system. I say "should" because, again, this is from the same brain cells that are more than slightly fuzzy.