Mac G3 reboots during installation

[Corey Mercer]

All of this is really good info. I feel like I'm
sponging off of everyone with no results and I
appreciate all of the advice. Regarding the dual drive
theory, I am only using one drive and the cd rom is on
ide2 separately.

-cor-

--- Bill Fink <billfink@mindspring.com> wrote:

> Hi Corey,
> 
> On Thu, 26 Aug 2004, Corey Mercer wrote:
> 
> > For those of you just tuning in :) I have a g3
> blue
> > and white tower 350Mhz with 640Mb RAM that I am
> trying
> > to install YDL 3.0.1 on and it keeps rebooting
> during
> > the installation at various different points
> during
> > the file copy process.. at one point it actually
> made
> > it to the second cd only to reboot a minute in.
> 
> I don't know if this applies to you or not, but I
> had very similar
> problems installing YDL on a B&W G3 a while back. 
> In my case, I
> was installing YDL on a second disk, and the system
> would crash
> at various random points.  The way I got it to work
> was to replace
> the internal disk with the second disk (jumpered as
> master), and
> then everything worked fine for me.  I believe this
> is caused by
> a hardware deficiency with certain B&W G3 models
> that causes DMA
> problems with a second IDE disk.  I'm attaching a
> couple of old
> messages that discussed the problems I encountered.
> 
> 					-Hope this helps
> 
> 					-Bill
> 
> 
> 
> Date: Sun, 30 Jun 2002 00:33:29 -0400
> From: Bill Fink <billfink@mindspring.com>
> To: "Timothy A. Seufert" <tas@mindspring.com>
> Cc: yellowdog-general@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com,
> Bill Fink <billfink@mindspring.com>
> Subject: Re: Booting YDL 2.1 on B&W G3 Problems
> 
> On Sat, 29 Jun 2002, "Timothy A. Seufert" wrote:
> 
> > At 11:38 AM -0400 6/29/02, Bill Fink wrote:
> > 
> > >Here are some of my experiences with installing
> Linux on a B&W G3 at work.
> > >First, it just would not install on the slave
> drive, so I had to switch
> > >master and slave.  It is my understanding that
> early B&W G3s cannot boot
> > >from a slave drive because of an OpenFirmware
> bug.
> > 
> > Hmmm... I'm fairly sure I've booted a B&W from a
> slave drive at one 
> > time or another.  I do remember not being able to
> do a plug & chug 
> > install of Linux to a slave, due to bugs in the
> installer.  (I forget 
> > which distribution and which version of it.)
> > 
> > BTW, Apple has a firmware update for B&W G3s, so
> if you have apparent 
> > OF bugs, apply it.  It applies both to rev 1 and
> rev 2 B&W G3 systems.
> > 
> >
> http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58374
> 
> Thanks for the tip.  I'll have to check it out.
> 
> > >But even after installing Linux on the now master
> drive, I was still
> > >having all kinds of problems actually running
> Linux on that system
> > >including weird system errors and file system
> corruption.  These finally
> > >went away went I installed a custom built
> 2.4.19-pre8-ben0 kernel.
> > >
> > >However, I noticed that Linux wasn't detecting
> the original (now slave)
> > >internal disk drive.  I tracked this down to not
> having the CMD64X driver
> > >configured in my kernel and added it in.  Linux
> then detected the slave
> > >drive, but unfortunately the weird system errors
> and file system
> > >corruption also returned.  I also checked and
> determined that the
> > >default YDL 2.1 2.4.10-12a kernel has the CMD64X
> driver enabled,
> > >which explained the earlier problem behavior.  It
> is my understanding
> > >that some of the early disks in the B&W G3s had
> buggy firmware, so I
> > >got bit by two early B&W G3 bugs.
> > 
> > I haven't heard of any disk firmware bugs before. 
> I think what you 
> > got bitten by is the known IDE chip bug.  The B&W
> originally shipped 
> > with rev 5 of the CMD646U2 controller.  Rev 5 has
> nasty corruption 
> > problems in UDMA mode in master/slave
> configurations.  Even with only 
> > a single drive attached, it can have problems
> (depends on the drive 
> > model -- some work fine, others don't, the only
> ones you can trust 
> > for absolute sure are the factory original drives
> which Apple did 
> > qualification testing on).
> > 
> > The reason you aren't having problems when you
> eliminate the CMD64X 
> > driver is presumably that the generic IDE driver
> can't enable UDMA 
> > mode.  It might not even be able to enable DMA.
> 
> Actually, being somewhat paranoid after all the
> severe problems I had
> run into, I finally removed the original internal
> drive to avoid any
> further problems.  I do have the CMD64X driver
> disabled in the current
> kernel:
> 
> astro% dmesg | grep CMD
> CMD646: IDE controller on PCI bus 01 dev 08
> CMD646: detected chipset, but driver not compiled
> in!
> CMD646: chipset revision 5
> CMD646: 100% native mode on irq 26
> 
> Is using_dma as reported by hdparm the same thing as
> the UDMA mode
> you were talking about?  If so, it still seems to be
> set on the new
> drive:
> 
> astro# hdparm /dev/hda
> 
> /dev/hda:
>  multcount    =  0 (off)
>  I/O support  =  0 (default 16-bit)
>  unmaskirq    =  0 (off)
>  using_dma    =  1 (on)
>  keepsettings =  0 (off)
>  nowerr       =  0 (off)
>  readonly     =  0 (off)
>  readahead    =  8 (on)
>  geometry     = 12009/16/63, sectors = 78165360,
> start = 0
> 
> Thus far I haven't had any problems with the new
> drive.  I guess that's
> why I thought it was a disk problem rather than a
> controller problem,
> although perhaps the problem only manifests itself
> in a master/slave
> setup.  IIRC even when I still had the original
> drive connected, it
> wasn't even detected by Linux at all without the
> CMD64X driver, so it
> was as if it wasn't connected, and this may be why
> it worked OK in that
> configuration.  However, this also confused me,
> since if the IDE driver/
> controller couldn't detect the original drive, how
> was it able to detect
> the new drive.  Apparently, the generic IDE driver
> has a problem
> detecting the original drive when it's the slave
> drive.
> 
> > Anyways, CMD fixed the problems in rev 7 of the
> chip, which Apple 
> > incorporated into Rev 2 of the B&W motherboard. 
> As far as I have 
> > ever been able to tell, that was the lone
> motherboard change during 
> > the product life of the B&W G3, which is pretty
> unusual and means 
> > that it was a solid design aside from the use of a
> buggy IDE chip.
> > 
> > How you can tell what you've got: Rev 7 chips are
> marked 
> > "CMD646U2-402", while Rev 5's lack the "-402". 
> The chip is located 
> > in a far corner of the motherboard, behind the PCI
> slots (between the 
> > slots and the slot covers).  Fortunately, it's on
> the 
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