OS X won't install on IDE drive on Tempo Trio |
November, 24, 2002 2:45 PM |
redlarry |
I have previously figured out how to get OS X 10.2 running on my 9600 with a Sonnet Crescendo G4-800MHz, a Sonnet Tempo Trio and the standard factory internal Apple SCSI hard drive hooked through the slow internal SCSI bus. However, I absolutely cannot get OS X to boot from my 6 GB Western Digital IDE hard drive. I’m afraid to buy a larger and faster IDE drive until I can get OS X to boot from my smaller Western Digital IDE drive. OS X is not worth it if I have to load it from a slow hard drive, so I *really* want to get it to boot with an IDE drive. The IDE can be initialized and can boot to OS 9 alone, so I know that it's working fine. However, when I use XPostFacto, it comes up with an error writing to the Mac’s NVRAM. This is only when I try to boot to the Western Digital IDE drive that is connected to the Tempo Trio card. When I use the same XPostFacto settings on the factory Apple SCSI drive, there is no NVRAM error and OS X boots. But it’s on that sucky old drive. When paging through back-threads on this forum, I found a post that mentioned that the NVRAM can get filled up, which causes the error. So, I renamed the Western Digital IDE drive to a short name of “OS X� and re-installed OS 9 from scratch on it, not installing any frivilous control panels that would add bloat to my NVRAM. I moved the Tempo Trio card to the first PCI slot, and the video card to the second PCI slot. Pressed and held down the cuda button every time. The error still came up. I whipped out the Sonnet installer and thought “what the hell.� It didn’t work either; it shows a circle-slash icon on the screen. The Sonnet installer never worked for me, anyway. I have already updated the firmware of the Tempo Trio to the latest version. I set up the Mac in a minimal fashion to isolate errors. This is how I have my Mac set up for the IDE installation which always fails: Absolutely nothing connected to any SCSI bus, internal or external (I pulled out the cable even). Sonnet G4 800MHz CPU installed. Sonnet Tempo Trio in the first PCI slot (closest to the processor). Twin Turbo 128 factory video card in the second PCI slot. All other PCI slots clear. Western Digital 6 GB IDE hard drive hooked as Master on its own ribbon cable to IDE bus 1. Creative IDE 32x CD-ROM hooked as Master on its own ribbon cable to IDE bus 2. That preceding setup gets the error. To get OS X running, the only thing I did was add the factory Apple SCSI 4 GB hard drive to the slow SCSI bus and put the install on that. But I *really* don’t wanna have to do that to get OS X working; I want to have only a new drive in there. There must be some way to do this; OS X boots fine even with the non-factory Creative IDE CD-ROM that was pulled from a Windows machine! If anyone has any tips or help, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! |
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RE: OS X won't install on IDE drive on Tempo Trio |
December, 10, 2002 7:27 PM |
OSXGuru |
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I have figured out now how to determine the @D, @E, @F stuff, so I will be getting out another version of XPostFacto one of these days that should cut down on the amount of NVRAM used. |
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RE: OS X won't install on IDE drive on Tempo Trio |
November, 27, 2002 4:38 PM |
joevt |
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I've had NVRAM problems also but they were somehow cleared up. I have a Power Mac 8600 with Sonnet Trio and Radeon 7000. I had to partition a 20GB IDE drive so that it starts with a < 8GB partition before OS X would install on it. I also had to connect the monitor to the built-in video connector for the installation or else booting would not complete. I tried a Toast backup of the OSX 10.2 Install disk but after the installation, an old style (10.1) spinning cursor would appear in the top left corner of the screen during boot. Installing using the original 10.2 disk does not have that problem. I would use the OS X Disk Utility to initialize an IDE drive because it will install all types of OS 9 drivers (FireWire, IDE and SCSI) if the option is selected. This allows the drive to be used by OS 9 no matter what you connect it to. Using Drive Setup in OS 9 will only install an OS 9 driver for the interface that the drive is connected to. eg. If it's connected to the Sonnet Trio, only the SCSI driver is installed and the drive will work in OS 9 only on IDE adapter cards that show up as SCSI. OS X does not use OS 9 drivers so it's possible to initialize a disk in OS X with no OS 9 drivers but there's no reason to do that because the drivers take only a small amount of space (1MB). I read somewhere (maybe in another thread) that the partition needs to have an HFS wrapper to boot and that erasing the disk in OS 9 would add that. I don't know if the OS X Disk Utility does not install an HFS wrapper or if it's required or how to detect if the wrapper exists but using the OS 9 Finder to erase the disk again wouldn't hurt (don't use OS 9 Drive Setup because it will remove the extra drivers that the OS X Disk Utility added). Removing control panels probably does not reduce the number of bytes used in NVRAM. The Radeon 7000 and Sonnet Trio have very long open firmware paths because they have their own PCI bridge chips. boot-device: pci1/pci-bridge/UltraTek133/FrmTk-0/@0:9 output-device: pci1/ATY,RV100Parent/ATY,RV100ad_A Notice that the boot-device path doesn't include the volume name. That means it doesn't matter how long a volume name is. Is your boot-device similar? A shorter name for the Radeon would be pci1/@D/ATY,RV100ad_A depending on the slot but I don't know how XPostFacto would get that from the Name Registry. It's possible that slots A1, B1 and D1 can always be translated to @D, @E, @F at least on an 8600. In open firmware, using the setenv command with the long Radeon name for output-device returns an error. I think XPostFacto stores it's stuff in the nvramrc option (but I haven't checked the XPostFacto source code). On my 8600, that is 1857 bytes (decimal). You can get this info using a program called "Display Name Registry" from the Apple Developer Website in the CardBus DDK Booting into open firmware and dumping everything to another Mac over a serial cable might be useful also. |
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RE: OS X won't install on IDE drive on Tempo Trio |
November, 26, 2002 2:25 PM |
OSXGuru |
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It sounds as though you are running into the problem with filling up the NVRAM space. One question is whether you are using the most recent version of XPostFacto (2.2.4 at this time). I keep trying to cut down on the amount of NVRAM needed. I'm assuming that your boot-device (reported in the XPostFacto window) is a little longer than usual--that is what causes the problem. One thing you could do is make sure that the input-device and output-device in the Open Firmware menu of XPostFacto are set to "none". That will save a bit of NVRAM space. |
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RE: OS X won't install on IDE drive on Tempo Trio |
November, 25, 2002 10:00 PM |
macman |
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FWIW, I too am experiencing problems installing X on a Trio card. My errors appear to be timing issues with the Trio card. Sonnet is working with me on this (and has been for approx 2 months). Their suggested install config is: Trio in slot 1 Drive on ATA connector 0 (the one closest to the front of the computer when the card is installed) Format with Apple disk utility in 9. Considering what was said by egonzales, I want to change my drive settings from master to single to see if this changes things on my problem. Stephen |
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RE: OS X won't install on IDE drive on Tempo Trio |
November, 25, 2002 9:34 PM |
rzdroj |
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FWIW, I have a PPC9500 with Sonnet G4 800MHz processor upgrade and Sonnet Trio in slot 2 with the latest firmware (1.2.5 I believe), an old Nexus GA Video card in slot 5, and, 512 MB non interleaved RAM. OSX 10.2.2 is now booting from the first 7GB partition on a Seagate 81 GB ATA drive connected to the inside IDE port on the Trio. I used the sonnet PCI X installer and installed from the original SCSI internal CD ROM. I tried to install from an external HP SCSI2 drive connected to an Adapted 29160N SCSI card but the install would never even start. I had no success installing OS X until I disconnected the internal SCSI hard drive connected to the built in internal SCSI port. I tried both the original 2GB internal SCSI drive and a recent Seagate 37 GB drive on the internal SCSI Bus. Finally, I disconnected the internal SCSI hard drive and added an active SCSI terminator at the far end of the SCSI cable. Even with the termination removed from the SCSI hard drive and the external terminator installed, OS X would not install. I can now boot from the ATA drive even with the SCSI hard drive reinstalled. I would like to try an ATA CDROM drive connected to the Trio card. The old original is pretty slow. I hope there is something in the above that will help. My remaining problem is that I bought a Radeon 7000 video card, but, after I install the Radeon software and the card, the system slowly deteriorates over several reboot attempts until I have to reinstall all over again to get anything to happen. Without installing the Radeon software, the system has been stable for several days since the last Radeonless install. |
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RE: OS X won't install on IDE drive on Tempo Trio |
November, 25, 2002 8:18 PM |
egonzales21 |
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I do not own a Western Digital drive but I believe I have read in many forums that these drives if they are the only drive on an IDE cable should be configured as "single drive" rather than master or slave. |