Lombard PowerBook G3 Won't Boot Off 8.6 CD

[Tim Seufert]

On Dec 16, 2003, at 7:30 AM, Chris Horn wrote:

> 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.

In that case it does seem likely to be a hardware problem of some kind.

> 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.

You can't rule bad RAM out completely, though.  I've seen problems 
where bad RAM mostly works under one OS and causes immediate failure on 
another.

> 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?

I'm afraid there aren't any boot messages to see.  MacOS has no text 
console to print boot progress messages to, so it doesn't generate any. 
  (MacOS X is a different matter of course.)