8500: XPostFacto: Open Firmware failing to boot |
August, 15, 2003 7:02 PM |
mitch |
I have a PowerMac 8500, Sonnet G4/800 upgrade, 512 MB RAM (qty 4 - 128 MB DIMMs interleaved), original 1 GB Quantum FireBall SCSI drive (ID 0), added a Seagate Cheetah 18 GB SCSI drive (ID 1, using 68 pin to 50 pin adapter). No PCI cards are installed. Everything else is "factory." I cannot get this computer to start up after using XPostFacto to select the OS 10.2 (Jaguar) CD as install source and either of the hard drives as the target to install. I have attached a PowerBook running ZTerm to the modem port to diagnose Open Firmware. Here's what's happening: - When I try to install to the built-in 1 GB drive, Open Firmware outputs the message (via modem port) "can't OPEN: scsi-int/@0:6" and repeats this message 30 times before it apparently gives up. - When I try to install to the Seagate Cheetah drive, Open Firmware waits around for a while (monitor is dark/no signal) and eventually outputs the message (via modem port) "DEFAULT CATCH!, code=FFF00300", followed by the standard Open Firmware welcome: Open Firmware, 1.0.5 To continue booting the Mac OS type: BYE To continue booting from the default boot device type: BOOT ok 0 > At which point I typed "BOOT" and return. After another pregnant pause, Open Firmware outputs: CLAIM failed ok 0 > At which point I type "BYE" and return. After I do this, it boots back into OS 9. Sometimes, with the Seagate drive, I get the offwhite screen on which you would expect to see the solid apple (OS X boot screen), but instead of the apple there's a circle with a line through it (the universal symbol for "don't/can't"?). Whatever could be going on here? PLEASE NOTE: I can install and boot OS 9 (even the patched 9.2.2 oldworld support from OS9Forever) on BOTH OF THESE DRIVES. - I don't think it's termination issues - I don't think it's RAM issues - I've zapped the PRAM (more than once), and I sincerely don't think it's PRAM issues. - I think it's an Open Firmware issue! I have the perfect setup to troubleshoot this, vis-a-vis a laptop hooked up to the modem port of the 8500 with a ZTerm connection to work with Open Firmware, but I'm no forth guru and don't really know much about manipulating Open Firmware! I would be forever indebted for some technically savvy guidance particularly at the Open Firmware level. Any takers? You will be legendary at UCSF's Institute for Health and Aging if you help us to get this to work. |
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RE: 8500: XPostFacto: Open Firmware failing to boo |
August, 22, 2003 12:00 PM |
rpm48 |
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I have an 8500 and have two drives with 10.2 and 10.2.6. One drive is connected to a Sonnet Tempo 100 and it is a 160 GB divided into four partitions. The other drive is a 2 GB SCSI woth a 68 to 50 pin adapter. I am not having any termination issues on that drive which is connected to the internal SCSI bus. The 160GB drive first partition is only 7.8 GB and I was having some trouble installing 10.2 on it. After much experimentation I found that the drive was connected as a slave device on the card through the cable select jumper settings. I moved the drive to the end of the cable and was able to successfully install the OS. I only mention this because throughout all the threads no mentioned the 8.0 GB limit on installing OX 10. Hope this helps. good luck I hope it works for you |
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RE: 8500: XPostFacto: Open Firmware failing to boo |
August, 18, 2003 3:23 AM |
tempest |
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My mistake. I meant 68-pin instead of 80-pin. Your 68-pin Seagate (16-bit bus) without termination may cause unpredictable behavior since your 50-pin Fireball is only providing termination for the lower 8 bits of the bus. This is the reason why the proper adapter is required. Single ended drives aren't as finicky but the LVD variety are very fussy. What you may want to do is disable your Quantum's termination and enable it on your Seagate, then place the 18GB at the end of the chain. I've found in the past that enabling single-ended mode on drives with this jumper will not get rid of proper termination issues between an 8-bit and 16-bit SCSI drives. FWB is one of the essential tools for accessing and changing SCSI drive mode pages. Their drivers may not be as compatible with Apple's tools, but their Drive Configure program is excellent. |
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E: 8500: XPostFacto: Open Firmware failing to boot |
August, 17, 2003 9:02 PM |
egonzales21 |
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Need a little clarification on your Seagate drive. Is it a 80 or 50 pin drive? Tempest is under the assumption that it is a 80 pin drive and I think it is a 68 pin drive. If it is a 68 pin drive, you are probably using a simple passive 68-50 pin converter. In this configuation, termination is off and the last drive, 1G Fireball is providing the termination. This should work OK. However 68 pin drives can be set to provide term power by default and can be switched from LVD mode to SE mode or do this automatically. Make sure term power is indeed off and that the mode type is set to auto or force the drive into single- ended mode using the appropriate jumpers. There should also be a jumper on the Seagate that enable/disable spin delay. This is essentially the same thing as unit attention. I have had similar setups using 68pin Maxtor Atlas 18Gb drives. Using a simple 68- 50pin adapter with this drive in the middle of the SCSI chain. Good Luck Ed |
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RE: 8500: XPostFacto: Open Firmware failing to boo |
August, 17, 2003 1:40 PM |
mitch |
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Many thanks to all for the great tips on SCSI termination and driver suggestions (Drive Setup, Intech's Speed Tools, FWB). I will try to apply some of these when I get back in front of the 8500 on Monday, but would also like the opportunity to provide clarification on some fine points about my system that could hopefully lead one of you amazing thinkers to spot the exact problem: As I understand it, the 8500's internal chain on the motherboard SCSI is terminated by the factory-supplied hard drive, which is cabled to be the last item on the chain, and I indeed note that the Apple OEM Quantum Fireball has the termination option jumpered on. I also believe that the Apple/ Quantum drive is providing termination power. The Seagate Cheetah drive has NO termination capabilities or options. By design. So if I take the internal hard drive off the SCSI chain, my internal chain will lack termination, for sure! However, installing Mac OS X to a 1 GB hard drive ain't gonna work. And in fact, I've tried to do just that (without the Seagate drive attached- that leaves us with the internal SCSI chain as "stock" factory provided), and I still get the behaviour I described for the internal drive (i.e. "can't OPEN: scsi-int/ @0:6" message repeated 30 times from Open Firmware via two-machine mode null-modem connection). So let's imagine for a moment that the termination power or termination have gone bad on the Quantum drive, and OS 9 survives this non-ideal state, but X won't. Then the question is: How does one go about terminating the internal chain? Is there a cheap little 50 pin gizmo I can buy to attach to the end of the internal SCSI cable that does this? Should I buy a "new old stock" official Apple/OEM replacement drive from sunrem.com or similar to get a drive that provides termination and term power? Lastly, I am FASCINATED by tempest's post and beseech him for further clarificaiton! Yes, this is an LVD variety drive and I have no idea if the upper 8 bits are terminated by my adapter. I presume this has to do with the wider bandwidth capabilities of the drive that I'm not able to use with my older motherboard SCSI controller, and would like to know more. I thought that this drive should be backwards compatible (it is advertised as such by Seagate) and operate successfully in a lesser/older mode, as indeed it does in Mac OS 9. I'm also wondering if Intech's Speed Tools or Apple's Drive Setup (or is this a jumper setting on the drive?) would allow me to make a low level setting like tempest describes, to ensure "unit attention is disabled in mode page 0"- I want to avoid using FWB based on advice from posts here, so am thinking about other options. Thanks again for all the great replies. |
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E: 8500: XPostFacto: Open Firmware failing to boot |
August, 17, 2003 3:21 AM |
tempest |
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My guess is your 80-to-50 pin adapter doesn't terminate the upper- eight bits and your 18GB drive is an LVD variety. You'd also need to confirm that your drive's unit attention is disabled in mode page 0. Consult FWB Hard Disk Toolkit. |
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E: 8500: XPostFacto: Open Firmware failing to boot |
August, 16, 2003 11:07 PM |
joevt |
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OS X does not use any dirvers that Drive Setup installs (or FWB or Intech). Those are only for OS 9. The OS X Disk Utility has an option to not install those drivers and yet OS X still boots. Only Open Firmware drivers are used during the initial startup of OS X to load XPostFacto's BootX which then loads the kernel stuff (which is unchanged except for the addition of some kernel extensions for Old World hardware). Those errors that you saw (DEFAULT CATCH, CLAIM failed and can't OPEN) are reported by Open Firmware and are either occuring before BootX is loaded or while it is running. The off white screen is drawn by BootX so it means that it is occasionally running. BootX will display some verbose output but you need to hold Command-V during startup before it loads. You can try setting the output option in XPostFacto to modem port to capture that BootX output. The verbose option in XPostFacto is for later verbose output. Have you tried a high throttle setting in XPostFacto? The problem and solution could be as powderhaus describes except that moving the CD contents to hard drive partition probably won't work if the problem is with the hard drives. scsi-int/@0:6 refers to SCSI ID 0 which is your original 1 GB drive, partition 6. Switching your scsi cable to the external bus connector (directly below the internal bus connectorI think) might help. You can also try disconnecting one of the drives (ensuring that termination is still correct). |
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E: 8500: XPostFacto: Open Firmware failing to boot |
August, 16, 2003 6:22 PM |
egonzales21 |
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Probably a SCSI issue. Many people have had good luck with changing the ID numbers of the drives. Try changing the 18Gb to 5 or 6. Another thing to try would be to use the 18GB drive alone with two partitions: one for OS X and one for a minimal 9.1 to start XPF from. SCSI termination is really tricky in OS X. How do you have the 18GB termed? Does the 80-50 adapter provide it or are you using a jumper? I had similar problems also with a 8500 when I did not use Drive Setup from 9.1 and failed to format the drive HFS+ Just a few thoughts. Good Luck Ed |
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E: 8500: XPostFacto: Open Firmware failing to boot |
August, 16, 2003 12:29 PM |
powderhaus |
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Oh yeah, What video card do you have? I get the message too when a Boot up but it displays on my screen, I have forgotten the reason, but on my computer it only displays it 3 or 4 times before it boots. I think it may have something to do with the time it takes the drive to start to load. Sometimes it can be termination and other people had luck moving the drives so the external but. I don't know if you have an External bus on the 8500 but if you do it is probably near where the external bus leads outside the computer. (when i talk about external bus i mean, inside you computer there will be a slot for that connects to the "external" bus.) |
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E: 8500: XPostFacto: Open Firmware failing to boot |
August, 16, 2003 12:20 PM |
powderhaus |
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Well FWB is nt recomended for OSX and most of the time will not work. If you are looking for a new Driver you have to Use Intech's Speed Tools, but i would doubt you would have better luck with them, over Apple's software. |
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RE: 8500: XPostFacto: Open Firmware failing to boo |
August, 16, 2003 12:18 AM |
mitch |
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Thanks for the input, powderhaus, but you've misunderstood and misdiagnosed the problem. The "startup process" that you speak of seeing by turning on "Verbose" mode in XPostFacto comes way, way after where the process is failing for me. Without the extra effort of a laptop null-modem cable hookup on an OldWorld Mac like the 8500, this problem would exhibit itself as a totally black screen (no signal) after the system startup chime, EVEN IF you chose "Verbose" mode in XPostFacto! See the technical article on Apple's site: http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1061.html to understand the lower level that I'm talking about in my post. You see, XPostFacto does not set the NVRAM in OldWorld Macs to boot from the CD drive- quite the contrary, it copies required extensions, and a (possibly modified) kernel and bootx file, to the target install HARD DRIVE and sets NVRAM to boot from the hard drive, NOT the CD. So when you select Verbose mode, you're actually seeing the OS X kernel loading from the hard drive, AFTER Open Firmware has booted your Mac from the hard drive. This modified OS X environment that XPostFacto sets up then passes the boot process off to the CD at an early moment in the boot sequence. It would be more likely, in the situation I'm facing, that the software driver on the hard disk is to blame for my issues than a non-OS X compatible CD-ROM drive (The built-in CD-ROM drive that shipped with the 8500, as I have, is totally compatible with what Ryan Rempel is doing with XPostFacto). However, both drives are formatted with Apple's Drive Setup (version 2.0.1), which I would think would provide an OS X compliant driver written to the disk at format time (however, I think I will try reformatting with FWB just to see what happens) I pray that the legendary Ryan Rempel reads my post and offers his profound wisdom! |
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E: 8500: XPostFacto: Open Firmware failing to boot |
August, 15, 2003 8:47 PM |
powderhaus |
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Well your CD rom drive is more than likely no longer supported in OSX as a bootable drive. Run a search for Apple System Restore on your hard drive. When you find it drag the CD icon into it. Then recover the CD onto a free drive or partition that is not the partition you are about to install OSX on. (this may mean you have to Repartition you drive, if you do make a 700MB partition) then tell XPF to install from that drive. Also most people just hit Verbose mode in the advanced menu in XPF, this displays all of the start up process on the screen. The can't open: SCSI-int/@0:6 sounds like it can't read your Boot drive (the CDROM drive) But if you do it under verbose mode it usually says "Waiting for Root" Good Luck! |
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