Beige Open Firmware Tweaks?

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Beige Open Firmware Tweaks?

First off, this is largely an annoying rehash, since I thought I started this topic yesterday morning. It seems to have vanished.

My major problems with my beige G3 have been solved, the drives and display now work. It is a Rev2 board with RevC ROM. The issue is that I got this machine for running Jaguar in the garage, it runs OS 9.2.2 very well now, but thus far won't yet boot from the Jaguar CD. The CDs "installer.app" quits with error -2, whatever that means. The System Disk utility loads firmware patches, but can't specify the CD directly. At first the display would disappear, and drive activity would cease. Next day I put Z-term on my PB1400 and was able to communicate with Open Firmware via the terminal, I told it to default to the beige's own i/o hardware with autoboot false. So then when I restarted I was in Open Firmware on the beige. If I said "BYE" it started OS 9 from the hard drive. If I said "BOOT" it spun the Jaguar CD, and told to me:
"BOOT mac-parts: no bootable HFS partition:
I tried a few things: booting from ide0/@0:1, ide0/@0:2, ide0/@0:0 - trying these with "use-nvramrc?" set to true, and then set to false. Either it'd start OS 9, or tell me there was no bootable partition.

I noticed that System Disk's "OFpt" resources are where the patches are stored. I replaced the Gossamer v.1.1.3 contents with those of the Jaguar CDs Gossamer v.1.2.0 (two lines difference, lines 42 and 43). It uses the new patch ok, but to the same effect. I know nowhere near enough about this stuff to write a patch of my own! I notice that on the Jaguar CD at "usr/standalone/ppc/bootx.xcoff" looks like what I want to tell Open Firmware to boot from, but I have as of yet no idea how. The CD gets scanned when I try to start from it, so there must be something I need to do to make it understood that this is the boot file!

I would very much appreciate any suggestions or advice about this! I have been working at getting this machine running for six hours a day all week, and still not booting Jaguar! This has been a great learning experience, but I have other projects on my bench which aren't getting done. Any ideas?
Metrophage

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Perhaps you should try using

Perhaps you should try using XPostFacto. Not only will it allow you to use Panther (I don't recommend it, however) it also is reported to be useful in helping people install Jag on stubborn Beige's. Give it a try:

http://eshop.macsales.com/OSXCenter/XPostFacto/

Good luck!

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more notes

I tried a few more things. I read the the utility "BootX 1.2.1" can get a mac to start from a .coff file, but it told me that it "can't find a suitable kernel file".

Tried renaming the boot drive and the system started acting odd (surprise...). Instead of "ide0/@0:0" I began to try "ide0/disk@0:0", "ata/ata-disk@:0", "ata/ATA-Disk@0:0". These changes in the boot device resulted in NO output device at all! No Rage128, no built-in Mach64 chip, no TTYA, no TTYB. Needless to say this was as exaperating as anything.

I specified the boot-file as being "/usr/standalone/ppc/bootx.xcoff", while I was trying the various drive names. This is completely foolish! I am setting specific drive and specific file - and the machine won't boot from them! AAIIIEEEE!!!!!! There must be some better syntax for describing these things which I have yet to discover. With all of the mac users out there, am I the only person surprised that there is no definitive reference manual for doing this sort of thing? This is supposedly a "supported" Jaguar machine, do most people just put the CD in and install with no problems? I am baffled. Will this take me two weeks? A month? Will I ever figure it out, or will I cast bottles into the electronic ocean for the rest of my life like a complete fool?

Pulling the battery reset everything, and after twenty minutes of fiddly BS the machine boots OS 9 properly again. This has brought about a few things I have decided I need to know:

env VS defaults - how do I MAKE a variable be a default, rather than just an environment setting? Specifically, I want to never use the built-in video ever, ever again. But when I reset the PRAM battery, it forgets that I "setenv output-device /pci@80000000/ATY,Rage128y@D". I need it to default to the Rage128 card permanently, unless I specify otherwise. All of my DB15 Mac multisync monitors have died long ago, it is going to be VGA from here out. It'd be really lame to be trying to recover from a hardware failure in inexpected circumstances, and need one of those annoying VGA adaptors. Never again!

How does one pause the scrolling of text in OpenFirmware? I tried "break", "pause", "space", many keys. When there is an nvram patch the text becomes longer and I miss the beginning of the list when I "printenv", then need to perform the command about twenty times to see the text as it whizzes by.

The NVRAMRC patches appear to have a lot to do with my system drive not being visible upon startup. When the patches are used, and I need to restart MacOS from Open Firmware, the drives pause about fifteen seconds before the spin - and I get a mystery disk "?" icon. How does one set the delay time of the drives so that they are recognized in time?

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X-PostFacto?

I would, but my drive is only 6GB. I thought I'd need more drivespace to do this the XPF way. Maybe I will try using the XPF control panel to boot the CD from, it probably applies patches which are to remedy exactly this kind of thing.

Thanks for getting me to think about this from another angle!

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XPF Why Not?

More specifically, Wallstreet, XPF could work. What is more crucial to me is knowing HOW OS X boots, and HOW to use Open Firmware. I am very much the "end-user" of my macs, and need to know exactly how to solve as many possible problems as I can.

Most of the Open Firmware gurus I have read online are not concerned with MacOS flavors, but with Linux or BSD. I feel like I am one of the only people out there who needs to learn Open Firmware tricks to simply install Mac OS. If I was trying to do Debian or NetBSD, I'd be in luck. XPF does its magic behind the scenes, which leaves me no wiser. If I can become proficient at this stuff then I can address some of the most difficult Mac OS problems (like mine, evidently...), and also use more varied operating systems on my macs.

My dad dumped two 7500 desktop machines on me to play with... at first I was wondering what I'd ever use them for. That week my wife, who is new to PPC machines, told me that she'd really like to have a PPC box which she could run Linux on. How would I install Linux on a PPC? A couple of weeks later, these are the very same sorts of things which I need to know to get Jaguar running on my Gossamer G3! I need to know how these things work!

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Tried it

I broke down and tried X-PostFacto today, Same exact deal, system simply refuses to boot from CD. In this case I was no even able to get an Open Firmware output. The machine chimed and went dark with no drives.

I tried emailing Ryan Rempel - the X-PostFacto guru - about where I can mail payment for their support service (instead of using credit card), but that was months ago and I never heard back.

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