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

[matthew dechant]

OK, I fixed it. Here was the solution, which may have been obvious to
everyone but me.

The IDE drive I was using was not original to the machine, therefore it had
not been formatted by a mac OS. As soon as I got my hands on the original OS
8.6 disk, and initialized the disk, and installed OS 8.6, the machine
functioned. I then restarted with the YDL cd, and removed all OS partitions
except for the one I couldn't remove, and made the default YDL partitions,
and it worked perfectly. 

Now I thought that YDL was supposed to install without any native Apple
partitions (except for the Apple bootstrap part. Installed by the YDL
install)?

Secondly, I was using an Adaptec aha2940 SCSI controller (not mac specific,
called power domain or something), which YDL recognized perfectly, but Open
Firmware did not. There are apparantly very few cards supported by OF, which
of course in both cases above, you FIRST need OF to support it and recognize
it as a bootable disk, even if YDL doesn't have a problem with it.

Well, hope this helps someone else.

-m

-----Original Message-----
From: yellowdog-general-bounces at lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
[mailto:yellowdog-general-bounces at lists.terrasoftsolutions.com] On Behalf Of
Eric Dunbar
Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 10:31 AM
To: Yellow Dog Linux General Discussion List
Subject: Re: B&W G3. No boot from old OS disk or YDL on hard drive,boots
from YDL CD

Matthew...

Just to confirm:
1. The B&W G3 *won't* boot from an OS 9 installer CD?
2. The B&W G3 WILL boot from a YDL install CD you made?
3. Is the HD an IDE or SCSI drive?

Comments:
1. Since you have another computer around, have you tried swapping CD-ROMs?
2. It's possible to type in an OF command to boot the default device (can't
remember what it is since I haven touched OF in aeons). If you can get to
yaboot it sounds like your computer will work just fine.
3. Make sure that the termination is correct on the HD and the CD-ROM (I'm
no termination guru though!... there's master, slave and a third setting
(that I can't remember off the top of my head)) 4. If the "operational" OS 8
on that 2nd HD was < 8.5 your B&W won't boot anyway. I'm wondering if
there's a strange quirk with the B&W's HD or IDE controller?
5. How big/new is the HD that's in the B&W? Was it original? How big is the
HD that you're trying to put in?
6. Take the HD from the B&W & try it in the Beige. If you can get it going
in the Beige you know there's something up with the B&W. If you can't get it
going in the Beige you know it's the drive!

And, if you get it going in the Beige, install OS 9 (don't fiddle with YDL
yet -- you're adding to the complexity of your trouble shooting) and then
see if you can get the B&W to boot with it.

... but why would the YDL CD boot while the OS 9 one doesn't (that's just
downright strange)?

You are holding down the C key when you restart the B&W with the OS 9 CD in
the drive?

How are you getting the YDL install CD to boot on the B&W?

Eric.

On Mon, 18 Oct 2004 09:24:02 -0500, matthew dechant <mdechant at insightpd.com>
wrote:
> 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?

<snip>
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