I recently acquired a beige G3, for use with the
components from my recently upgraded B&W. I have
experienced more bizarre problems with this beige G3
than any computer I have ever used.
It is a Revision 2 board, with a Revision C ROM, Open
Firmware 2.4. After lots of fiddling I was able to get
it to recognize ATA drives, and installed OS 9.2.2 on
the 6 GB drive I bought it with. So long as I do not
need to change anything, OS 9 runs fine, quite snappy.
However I cannot do hardly anything on this machine
without constantly pulling the battery and/or
resetting the firmware. Example? If OS 9 wastes too
much time on something (can't eject disk in drive),
and I need to unplug the machine, it will then not
boot back into OS 9 from the hard drive. The firmware
settings have no changed - it just won't do it, giving
instead the floppy-question-mark screen. The
"command-option-p-r" combo does not appear to work on
my machine, so I need to pull the battery. Then I can
start from the CD, which freezes, the boot from CD
again, and select boot from the hard drive. So trying
things is very time consuming! Why would the machine
cease to boot if I temporarily replace the DVD-ROM
drive with a CD-ROM drive (both Apple)? If I specify a
new boot device which it does not like (such as a
Jaguar CD...), then things are more difficult, as I
need to reset the Open Firmware defaults, and then do
the other steps.
I have read on boards on MacOS and Linux topics that
the firmware on the beige G3s is flaky, sometimes a
patch makes things either more or less flaky,
depending on the situation. I have tried with
use-nvramrc? set to false, for no patch. I have used
the Apple "System Disk" utility to apply the patch
which is supposedly useful for being able to boot
UNIX-like OSes. I tried using the NVRAMRC patch which
is on the Jaguar CD in the Gossamer folder. I
certainly do not know enough to make patches of my own
yet!
Using OS 9 is not a priority for me on this machine.
Dual-boot would be nice, but I need it to run Jaguar
(or better). I have never been able to get this
machine to boot from an OS X CD. I have tried with
only a blank HFS+ drive and no OS 9. I have tried
using the "installer.app" from the Jaguar CD. I have
tried using Startup Disk. I have tried booting with
the "C" key. Today I "gave up" and tried with
X-PostFacto. All with the same result. I have not read
anywhere any accounts of a machine, even Gossamer,
behaving like this.
The best results have been when I set OpenFirmware to
use the boot-device "ide0/@0:0" (or partition 1,
2...). I restart and OF simply tells me that there is
no bootable partition there. When I try with
X-PostFacto, it chimes and I get no drives, no Open
Firmware, no anything. Yes, I checked for TTY i/o. The
DVD drive and CD work fine together, as this is how my
several installs on the B&W were done.
I have read that when an OldWorld machine boots OS X,
the machine boots to partition 0, and when no system
folder is located, it boots instead from
"usr/standalone/ppc/bootx.xcoff". My machine certainly
doesn't! I have even specified "ide0/@0:0" as the
firmware boot device, and "bootx.xcoff" as the
boot-file.
As a bit of an Open Firmware newbie, I am completely
baffled by what exactly is going on here. I have been
working on getting this machine to boot OS X for a
week, no less than six hours per day! I am starting to
run out of ideas, and feel a bit burnt, I am getting
quite sick of that machine's inconsistant behavior. I
need to know exactly what is happening when it refuses
to boot properly. I need to know what exactly is
supposed to happen to get it to boot OS X. To my
amazement, I have found no info out there which I have
not already tried. Still, it is a common machine, even
if there is no Using Open Firmware for OS X Manual
(why not?), somebody out there must understand this
situation.
If anybody has any observations, suggestions, advice,
knowledge, etc which could help me with this, I would
very much appreciate it! Really!
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