Lombard PowerBook G3 Won't Boot Off 8.6 CD

[Chris Horn]

Let me begin by thanking everyone who has helped me so far.  Your
knowledge has definitely given me a better understanding of this poor
little G3 and will hopefully, one day, help me figure out what is wrong
with the darn thing.

> A MacOS 8.6 CD shouldn't need a hard drive at all to boot.  For that
> matter I'm fairly sure even OS X boot CDs don't try to set up swap, at
> least not until after installation has begun.  (One of the functions of
> an OS X boot CD is to repair damaged partitions, so it can't mount any
> HD partitions read/write until the user decides to install to one of
> them.)

Well, that makes sense and is good to know.

>> FWIW - I also can't boot off the YDL CDs that I used to install YDL
>> just a
>> couple of weeks ago.  This leads me to believe that something more
>> serious
>> is wrong with the machine than just not booting off it's OS 8.6 CD.
>
> Forgive me if you've mentioned trying it already, but you might want to
> try removing and reseating the CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive in your Lombard.
>   If you're still able to boot Linux you should also see if it can mount
> the YDL CDs.

Two nights ago, I cut all power to the computer, removed the CD drive and
then plugged it back in.  I did several combinations of that - I have NOT
yet powered up the computer w/o the CD drive in the bay, though.  Maybe
I'll try that and then power it down and try again.

Last night I thought the exact same thing ("Is the CD drive defective?
That would be the easy answer."), but was able to mount the 8.6 CD in
linux as well as through Mac-on-Linux.  The disk mounts just fine and is
accessible.

> If you hold down C immediately after powering up or rebooting, OF will
> try to boot a CD first regardless of the boot-device setting.  About
> the only way Linux (or any other OS) could keep CD booting from working
> is to screw up OF variables other than boot-device badly enough to
> prevent OF from using the CD.  Linux typically never alters anything
> other than boot-device so this is unlikely.  (Also, if that was your
> problem I'd have expected the firmware reset tricks to fix it.)
>
> Speaking of firmware resets, one thing that hasn't been mentioned so
> far is the reset button.  It's on the back of the computer between the
> VGA and modem ports.  It may or may not help...

I will try this firmware reset, but I am not hopeful that this is the
problem.  You see, the booting off the CD begins, only to halt
unexpectedly (the cursor appears and can be moved, but then freezes). This
leads me to believe that everything about the firmware setting up the boot
device is working just fine, but that there's some more serious problem
with the computer that's causing the Mac OS boot process to fail.

If I didn't know any better, I'd say it was likely a RAM problem, but I've
never had a problem with the RAM before.  Plus, it works just fine in
Linux.

Is there anyone from Apple out there who knows the boot process for Mac OS
8.6?  What gets loaded right after the cursor appears?  If I could see the
progress of things loading (a la Linux) I could better figure out what's
going wrong on my machine.  Are there any hacks out there to show Mac OS
boot messages?

Again, many thanks to those helping solve this very odd problem.
chris.