its been a few days since your problem so i hope you have it fixed by now. if so please share how you did it with the rest of us. if not, then it would help if you posted your system and peripheral specs. But if you have two cd drives this should be easy enough. simply boot from another cd w/system, almost any system 9, and then run the installer from the other. I also had trouble getting my 9.2.1 disk to mount when pressing c. If you don't have another cd, like a cdrw, but you've been thinking about getting one, then perhaps this would be a good excuse to justify getting one. (oh, it would have to be a firewire cdr(w) to be recognized by a bootable disk i beleive) One other slightly more difficult way to do it is by putting your installer cd in while x is launched and choose it as your startup disk. this should launch the installer when you reboot. run the installer all the way thru. Now is where it might get tricky. If you can, go to startup control panel and choose one of your harddrive's systems (9 should be installed by now) as the startup. When I did this it would not respond to my commands. so I rebooted and with paper clip handy, immediately did a manual eject of disc before the computer started looking for it. You must be quick and know what you are doing at this point as you could damage the drive if it is accessing the disk or so I have heard. Once the selected startup disk is out, it should default to the drive's system and boot normally. When you have rebooted in osx, go to classic in system prefs and configure it the way you want it. now you're gaming. you also might want to try running an uptodate diagnostic and repair program on the harddrive as some system malfunction may be at root of the recognition problem. A few days ago I would have recommended drive 10 and/or techtoolpro, but after diskwarrior was the only one to solve an external harddrive recognition problem, I would enthusiastically recommend it.