On Thu, Nov 04, 1999 at 10:57:43AM +0100, Andreas Gruenbacher wrote: > Hi, > > I have a little problem getting my PowerMac 4400/200 to boot again. > > As I was used to on Intel machines, I just repartitioned the harddisk with > pdisk > and removed all MacOS partitions. Now the darn thing doesn't boot anymore. I > don't get into Open Firmware, either.
Makes sense since you wiped everything from your drive and OF is by default out to the serial port. > >From several bits of documentation I conclude that Open Firmware uses the > >serial > port per default on this machine. At least, if I press the magical Open > Firmware > keys at boot time, the monitor doesn't get any signals (as opposed to when I > press nothing). Yep, that will start OF on the serial console. :) > I would like to build a NULLMODEM CABLE so that I can configure my Mac from a > PC. I don't have a second Mac. Does anybody know the pinout and which pins to > connect for that purpose? I couldn't find any suitable online documentation on > the Web. > > Is there any other way I can get the machine boot properly again? Does a MacOS > CD help? Here's my method for installing to a pmac when you have no MacOS installed, some Linux/Unix box, a flopy drive, and a MacOS CD: Retrieve my compressed HFS bootvars disk image from http://www.debian.org/~porter/pmacdl/bootvars.bin.gz, uncompress it, and dd it to a floppy. Boot the MacOS CD. When it comes to the desktop, insert the BootVars disk, and run bootvars from the floppy. Change the bootvars to perform I/O on the correct devices (on my Tanzania mobo, it is 'screen' for output and 'kbd' for input, I hear it is different on others). Also change the boot-device to 'fd:linux' boot-file to 'root=/dev/0200 load_ramdisk=1' to automagically boot the Debian install disk. This can be done from OF too, of course, now that you set I/O devices correctly. > Which settings do I need in Open Firmware to boot from CD, provided that I get > into Open Firmware (ever)? If boot-device is set to /AAPL,ROM then it should boot from the CD. The only exception I found was when I got my drive that had Norton disklock on it, I had to unhook it until I change the boot-device so I could get into OF. -- Matt Porter [EMAIL PROTECTED] This is Linux Country. On a quiet night, you can hear Windows reboot.
