[G4] G4 Mirrored Drive Doors question

[Bruce Ryan Nakamura]

Hello:

Can anybody elucidate me about the following situation I am having with my
G4 Mirrored Drive Doors Powermac that can boot natively in OS 9.

I bought my G4 MDD from the original owner with the original System Restore
CD's that came with the MDD from the factory.  These CD's have OS 9.2.2 and
10.1.3 on them.

When I took delivery of the MDD, the original owner had Tiger on it, but did
not install OS 9 because he did not need it.

When I tried to install OS 9, what I have found is that this MDD will no
longer recognize the original System Restore CD's.  In other words if I put
CD number 1 into the DVD drive, my MDD will not "see" the CD in the drive.
It is as if there is no CD in the drive.

The entire MDD was passed by Tech Tools Pro 4  and I have verified that the
hard drive and DVD drive are good.

My hypothesis is that when the software gets upgraded from 10.1.3 to Jaguar
to Panther to Tiger, somewhere along the upgrade path, the software
installation also changes the firmware on the board and it won't allow an
older system to be installed.  I sometimes have kernal panics when trying to
reinstall 10.3.2 from a set of Powermac G4 DVDs that I also own.  I ended up
going to the Honolulu Apple Store and loaded up 10.3 through the Firewire
port, since I couldn't load off the DVD's.

What do you think?

Thank you in advance,

Bruce Ryan Nakamura