Re: Did I produce a brick of my PPC8200?

[Sven Lankes <sven@killefiz.de>]

On Sun, Jun 10, 2001 at 05:02:38PM -0700, Andrew Sharp wrote:

> um, something that people informed me about when I hosed my system
> was that you can boot the system holding down the cmd-opt-P-R keys,
> and it will reset the nvram to the defaults so you can start all
> over again trying to get it to boot with OF/quik.  When this
> actually works (sometimes it takes a couple of tries) my machine did
> the chimes twice.  my advice is after you reset the nvram, read the
> man page for nvsetenv and for quik before doing anything precipitous
> like changing your boot-device.  it helps to find out for sure what
> the disk device is to use.  like, is your hard drive set to scsi id
> 0 for sure, and like that.  if you can get into the OF, check your
> aliases to make sure that you have a scsi-int alias, and that it
> points to the right scsi bus that your disk is on.  My 8500 has two
> scsi controllers, and they both have a connector on the motherboard,
> but only one is attached to the external connector.

Here's an update of my situation.

Resetting the nvram worked so I was able to reboot from
the debian-install disks again.

I read quite some pages on the topic I've found and 
tried again:

1. booted into debian-install and changed to the 2nd console
2. nvsetenv boot-device 'scsi/sd@0:0'

    my hd is not the original one but it is found by the 
    kernel on the boot-disk as ibm scsi hd and it is 
    id 0 on controller 0.

3. mount -t ext2 /dev/sda3 /target

    /target/etc/quik.conf looks like this

    timeout=10
    partition=3

    image=/boot/vmlinux-2.2.19
 	label=linux
	root=/dev/sda3
	read-only

4. mount -t proc proc /target/proc
   chroot /target /sbin/quik -v -f 

   that went without error so I went on

5. umount /target/proc
   umount /target
   /sbin/reboot

And then: nothing. The screen stays blank. I guess that
it hangs in the OF-Prompt which I cannot see because
it's a 7200/8200 which cannot display the OF on the screen
(this is just sick!).

I can flash the nvram again and start over: same story.

I'll try to find a cable to connect the mac-serial
and my i386 debian-box. Maybe that will give some
more information. 

Any more hints on what else to try?

BTW: If I find a macos cd somewhere and if I install
macos on the powermac, can I choose to create a real
small macos partition so that I just install bootx
on it? Or does macos grab the complete hd and if
so is it possible to shrink the partition afterwards?

(You see: I don't know anything about macs/macos 
but I'm not yet willing to give up on getting GNU/Linux
running on it. Any hints are welcome.)

-- 
'Statistics show that teen pregnancy drops off significantly
after age 25.'
	-Mary Anne Tebedo, May 14 1995