Problem booting J700 |
December, 31, 2002 9:56 PM |
ken882 |
Hi, I have a UMAX J700 currently running OS 9.1, and I'm trying to use XPostFacto 2.2.5b7 to install OS X v10.2. My machine has a Crescendo PCI G4 800 Mhz accelerator, a Radeon 7000 video card, and I'm trying to install OS X to an IDE drive connected to a Tempo Trio card. When running XPF, when I get to the Restart part, the machine restarts, and I see a white screen with the message "NVRAM string value is too big" followed by 30 repetitions of the string "can't OPEN:". After that, XPF boots me into OS 9.1. After the reboot into 9.1, I no longer can see any of the 3 partitions of the drive that's connected to the Tempo Trio card. Upon a subsequent shutdown and restart, I can then see the 3 drive partitions. Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated. Thank you. Ken |
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RE: Problem booting J700 |
January, 26, 2003 8:21 PM |
ken882 |
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OSXGuru, Thanks for the info. A couple of days ago, I finally got XPF 2.2.5 to run on my machine. In order to do this, I pulled the Temo Trio card, and installed OS X to a 2 Mb SCSI drive (a tight fit, but it worked). The install went fine, but after running Sonnet X Tuneup 1,2,6 and the October 2002 ATI Retail Update and replacing the original J700 video card with the Radeon 7000 Mac Edition card and rebooting, I encountered a system freeze almost immediately. After that, I started getting blue screen freezes. So I replaced the original video card, reinialized the OS X drive, and used XPF to do the install again. This time, I didn't run the Sonnet Tuneup nor did I install the ATI video software, and I've been in OS X for about 2 hours now with no problems at all. I'm starting to think that the Sonnet Tuneup might have something to do with the system freezes that I've encountered. Are you aware of any problems with the Sonnet Tuneup software? I can tell that my machine isn't running as fast now, which is probably related to the lack of cache management. The OS X install under XPF also took about twice as long as under the Sonnet Installer, but using XPF, I have never had any freezes during the install process as I have had using the Sonnet installer. If it helps at all, I have two 128 MB 60ns DIMMs for RAM (I removed the 16Mb DIMM that came with the machine). I bought the memory from OWC (item# OWC5MD128BE), with serial numbers 292406 and 292445. Is this memory compatible with the Sonnet G4 800Mhz card and OS X on a UMAX J700? If the current configuration of my system remains stable for a few days, I'll try reinstalling the Tempo Trio card and rerunning XPF as you suggested. Thanks again for your hard work with XPF. |
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RE: Problem booting J700 |
January, 26, 2003 7:05 PM |
OSXGuru |
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Version 2.2.5 is available now--I just forgot to update the link that you were looking at (thanks for reminding me). Given how far you are getting, you must be only a few bytes over--XPostFacto has enough NVRAM space to write your settings, but the Trio firmware doesn't have enough space to rewrite them. One workaround is to minimize the settings you use. For instance, don't select anything in the debug menu of XPostFacto, don't select verbose mode or single user mode in the "Advanced" menu, and don't set an input-device or output-device. All those settings take some NVRAM space. XPostFacto 3 will use a few more tricks to minimize the amount of NVRAM needed, but until then, this is the best you can do. The freeze at the blue screen won't be NVRAM related--it occurs at too late a stage for that. It could have to do with video preferences--you could try deleting the following file to see if it helps: /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist |
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RE: Problem booting J700 |
January, 24, 2003 10:18 PM |
ken882 |
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OSGuru, I found and downloaded XPF 2.2.5b7 (FYI, the link to the download page still says 2.2.4). I ran it in verbose mode, with extra diagnostics specified, and go the following messages displayed on the screen: NVRAM string value is too big Open Firmware 1.0.5 I was wondering if there is any way I can modify the settings to get more information about the size of the NVRAM string that XPF is trying to write, v.s. the amount if NVRAM space available. If I could get this information, I might be able to learn if the string is too long by just a few bytes or if there's a more fundimental bug in the string generation code that might be making it much longer than necessary. Thanks |
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RE: Problem booting J700 |
January, 21, 2003 10:30 AM |
ken882 |
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OSGuru, Is XPF 2.2.5 available somewhere for testing yet? |
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RE: Problem booting J700 |
January, 21, 2003 12:45 AM |
joevt |
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OSXGuru, Is that NVRAM rewrite that the Tempo Trio does the same as the name change in the boot-device variable that happens between OS 9 and OS X that you mentioned before? Have you ever tried making some of the Open Firmware variables point to the apparently empty first 2K of NVRAM? I remember you had an idea about saving panic text somewhere to be loaded on next boot. Is that where you would put it? |
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RE: Problem booting J700 |
January, 20, 2003 10:20 PM |
ken882 |
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Ryan, Thanks for the info. But are you replying to my originsl problem when I was trying to use XPF, or is the Sonnet installer not leaving me with enough NVRAM space for the Tempo Trio to do its thing at boot time? I was starting to think that my current problem with freezes at the blue screen and while running OS X was due to a RAM problem instead of a NVRAM problem. If you feel that the Sonnet installer could be contributing to my current problems, then I'll reinitialize my disk and try the latest version of XPF. Thanks for your reply and for your continued hard work. |
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RE: Problem booting J700 |
January, 20, 2003 8:42 PM |
OSXGuru |
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The "NVRAM string value too big" problem is a little subtle. The issue is that there is only a limited amount of NVRAM in the older machines, and the settings required to install Mac OS X use quite a bit of it. Of course, XPostFacto checks to see whether the size limits are exceeded or not. However, one of the things that the Tempo Trio firmware does when booting is rewrite some of the NVRAM. This takes a little more space, and in some cases (like yours) you can run out, with the effects that you describe. Version 2.2.5 of XPostFacto should help with this--I made some changes that conserve NVRAM better than previous versions. (Version 3 will help even more, I think). |
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RE: Problem booting J700 |
January, 20, 2003 6:24 PM |
ken882 |
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powderhaus, Thanks for the suggestion about moving my video card to the rightmost slot. Doing this enabled the Sonnet installer to work. Prior to this, I've been using both XPF and the Sonnet installer, with neither really getting into the install sequence at all. Now, I've got 10.2 installed, but I'm plagued with system freezes, some during the install process. When 10.2 is working, it works great, but after a freeze, it's quite difficult to restart it without getting a freeze at the blue screen (it always makes it to the blue screen). If anyone can provide clues, I'd much appreciate it. I've also sent an email about this problem to Sonnet's tech support. If I get any useful info from Sonnet that solves my problem, I'll post it on this forum. Thanks. |
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RE: Problem booting J700 |
January, 11, 2003 6:57 PM |
powderhaus |
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I have never been able to get any cards to work in the left slots, Maybe it is because i only have 2 to choose from... Has any one ever gotten a wireless networking card in the left 2 slots? |
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RE: Problem booting J700 |
January, 11, 2003 6:39 PM |
dreibel |
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that's funny, because I have four PCI slots in this J700 - one in which my ATI Rage Orion card sits on the far right, followed leftwise with an M-Audio Audiophile 2496 sound/MIDI card, an Entrega USB 1.1 card, and an ACARD Ahard ATA/66 adapter. The only card that has given me any trouble in position has been the Audiophile, which needs to sit in slot 2. FWIW, those two soldered-over areas further to the left can also have PCI slots installed and made functional, a guy on Low End Mac's Supermacs mailing list named Mad Dog discovered this when he experimented with a spare J700 motherboard he bought (turns out the J700 motherboard is the S900 motherboard with two PCI slots and one processor slot soldered over). One warning - unless you have very good soldering/desoldering skills, don't try to do this by yourself, there are a lot of holes to desolder and clean up. questions to the original poster - are you trying to install Jaguar via an internal CD-ROM drive or an external SCSI one? When I first tried installing OS X 10.0.3 to my J700 I had similar problems to yours while using the stock Matsushita 8X SCSI drive inside mine - when I then tried using the external LaCie CD/RW drive I have on the external SCSI 1 bus (set to ID 3) everything installed fine. (I've since ripped out the Matsushita and replaced it with a Toshiba DVD-ROM drive which I've attached to the AHARD, and that I use for my 10.1 and Jaguar disks for installation with no problems: when I do an OS X install I use my original 10.0.3 with the external, then upgrade with the 10.1 upgrade disk and the 10.2 upgrade disk via the DVD) also, you didn't tell us what brand of IDE drive you're trying to install Jaguar to - does this happen to be a Western Digital? There have been some reports that Western Digital drives attached to IDE/PCI cards don't take too well to Jaguar installs, with similar symptoms to yours (won't boot in OS X, then reboots into OS 9). I know because I have a Western Digital attached to the AHARD that won't take Jaguar..... |
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RE: Problem booting J700 |
January, 11, 2003 3:37 PM |
powderhaus |
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There is only room for one other PCI card aside from the Video card. |
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RE: Problem booting J700 |
January, 11, 2003 3:36 PM |
powderhaus |
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You can ONLY HAVE 2 PCI cards in a J700. They must both be in the slots to the far right and the video card has to be in the right slot. There are 2 different PCI buses on the J700. the left two are some 3rd party's and the right two are Apple's. As for the NVRAM I have no idea, i have a J700 and have had only one other problem, the stock CD-Drive will not proform the install. I never had the NVRAM problem, It probably has to do with the Sonnet card. Good luck! |
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RE: Problem booting J700 |
January, 11, 2003 8:31 AM |
ken882 |
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I'm still having problems getting my J700 to initially boot to do an initial install of OS X 10.2. I keep getting errors related to the fact that the NVRAM string is too large. Does anyone know of any way I can research this without waiting for a new update of XPF? Can I control how much NVRAM exists on my machine? Or is there any way that I can get XPF to dump the entire NVRAM string into its log file and then subsequently update the NVRAM manually using some sort of editor? |
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RE: Problem booting J700 |
January, 01, 2003 7:22 PM |
ken882 |
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Hi, Here's some more information and a clarification of what I saw. The output that I originally reported was when I had specified "Extra Diagnostics" in the "Debug" menu of XPF, and specified VGA as the output device. When I specified "None" as the output device, and turned off "Extra Diagnostics", when XPF did the reboot, I got the gray Apple screen, which was displayed for a few seconds, and then a text screen with a black background appeared, with the following lines of text displayed: standard timeslicing quantum is 10000 us vm_page_bootstrap: 65233 free pages mig_table_max_displ = 64 COLOR video console at 0x8c008000 (640 x 480 x 8) At this point, nothing more happens. Ken |
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