B&W G3. No boot from old OS disk or YDL on hard drive, boots from YDL CD

[matthew dechant]

Good morning everyone,

With the risk of starting to be annoying, I'll ask this question one more
time on the general mailing list. If no one has any suggestions that's fine,
I'm just trying to figure out if I should give up on this machine or not.

Blue and White G3.
Boots off the YDL disks I made, find the hard drive, and appears to install
YDL, no problem.
Won't boot to YDL upon restart. Only boots to open firmware prompt or
question mark if left alone.
Tried an ATA IDE, SCSI, and regular IDE drive, no go.

It won't boot off a purchased OS 9 CD, nor will it boot off a beige G3
install disk. Also tried a hard drive with operational OS 8.something I
pulled from a beige G3. All I get is the question mark.

Reset Pram more times than I want to count and pulled the battery overnight.
I put a new battery in it.
I also put new Ram in it.

I thought maybe (after some reading) that I needed to upgrade to firmware on
the machine, so that's when I tried to install a version of OS, because it
appears that you can't do it from a CD?? Is this most likely the problem,
firmware?

Is there something wrong with the machine maybe?

I did the default install, and let it configure the partitions, which it set
to:

/dev/hda1 = apple bootstrap 8mb

/dev/hda2 = / extended partition 1500something MB

/dev/hda3 = SWAP 256MB

>From the open firmware cmd prompt:

Printenv

boot-device /pci at 80000000/pci-bridge at d/pci-ata at 1/@0/disk at 0:1,\\:tbxi

hd:,\\:tbxi 

Which it is my understanding that it should have been changed from \\:tbxi
<file://:tbxi/>  to yaboot, correct? But that you still should be able to
manually boot into YDL from here, and you can manually change the
boot-device variable anyway.

 

The hard drive appears to be recognized, in the respect that if you do

Boot hd:0,yaboot

You get "LOAD-SIZE too small", and if you do:

Boot hd:4,yaboot

You get "couldn't locate partition"

But doing:

Boot hd:2,yaboot or boot hd:2,ofboot.b

Can't load yaboot or ofboot.b

 

I searched all over for additional commands, and even downloaded some
whitepapers on open firmware. I can't find a "ls" or "dir" command for OF,
so how can I really verify that yaboot is there?

-m