Re: Booting your PowerMac (from the HD, without MacOS)
* Matt Reynolds (mattatwork@techie.com) [000630 13:04]:
> Ok, after going through the archives of this list, and abusing google quite
> a bit, it seems as if the process of getting a Power PC Mac to boot is not
> only difficult, but not very well documented, at least for oldworld style
> macs, which is what I have.
> Personal questions:
> >From what I understand about OF, at least the broken flavors, you *must*
> connect to the damnable mac comm ports. Is this right? Does someone have
> the pin-out of the mac comm port so maybe I could splice a serial to maccomm
> cable? I don't have other Macs lying around, or dumb terminals (unless you
> consider windows...) that can interface with that port.
You can use BootVariables, a mac program
(ftp://mirror.linuxppc.org//linuxppc-R4/install/bootvars-1.3a.sit.hqx)
to set input-device to kbd (if there is an alias for kbd) and
output-device to screen (if there is an alias for screen). Without
aliases, you have to point them directly to the OF device name.
>
> I have a Power Mac 8500/180. Is this oldworld? I'm assuming so...
Yes.
>
> If you're not going to use MacOS on your PPC box, you can trash the disk
> (reinitialize it with mac-fdisk) and make whatever the heck you want. Is
> this correct?
Yes, you can. But my experince with OF is not very good. It is very easy
to loose your OF settings (for no reason). This is my experience with OF
1.0.5 on a 7200, 7300 and a Umax J700 (I was able to reboot without
problems most of the time, but cold boot was often problematic). I guessed
that OF 2.0 based machines would be pretty much more reliable.
If you have to reset your OF 1.0.5 settings without a Mac OS, then you'll
need a console access through the serial port.
Cheers,
Simon
--
PGP key ID: 1024D/99290743 Simon Piette <spiette@generation.net>
PGP Key fingerprint: 9AF9 33F9 A900 E153 9DF3 0625 8928 CB52 9929 0743
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