Hard drive scanning woes

Mind, what mind? Where? After meticulously backing up a failing hard drive all day yesterday and into the wee hours and reconciling orphan files, only to have new hard drive not show up....I have no mind. No nails or hair left either.

I need an older, make that retro, G4 OS 9 bootable Mac to support an obsolete SCSI Nikon Coolscan on loan..it won't run under Classic mode. I need to scan some negatives for Pat Nolan's book on Black Bart Poetry Newsletter for Poltroon Press. Seems like I was the only one taking photos in those daze. And I need to liberate those images from the negative past. Alas, I haven’t had darkroom access since 1990. I don’t miss the chemicals.

My artist wishlist. A working modern slide/film scanner. Meanwhile my G5 iMac HDD laid down and died (you already know that) and I don't have the right OS Tiger install disks, and cloning no longer works—Daisy the sheep syndrome. Bad files promulgating bad files. And I'm waiting for my replacement Seagate drives to arrive... I'm thumb/hoof twiddling the night away, here, folks. And all this under deadline.