In my past work where I maintained 100s of tray-loads as well as other iMacs, we kept a NetBoot image that booted into OS 9 that included diagniostic tools as well as an ASR image of the machine so we could reimage it.

We ran all these machines in OS 9, and at the time, didn't have the NetBoot capacity to NetBoot them all,...eventually we increased our server capacity,...

So, for old iMacs like tray-loads, keep a NetBoot server handy,...if nothing else, it's an easy way to know if the machine is having a hardware issue or software issue. I would guess that most folks who have this problem have a lot of old iMacs,..and probably also have an OS X server that could do this,...and perhaps even an extra copy of 10.2 server in the box that could be loaded up somewhere to server this purpose,...

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I've used the bootpd and tftpd that are included in OS X (client), to serve the kernel and initrd to a Linux client in my home network. I know OS X server will serve OS X to netboot clients, but I never understood what stops the client from serving the same -- is it because we don't receive the netbootable kernel (OS image) with OS X client? Anyway, some (freely available, Unix-like) OSes can be served over the network, from a OS X client system; Larry.

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