philo wrote:
Long shot asking here but they did not know on the vintage Mac group
I was given a G4 tower 500mhz with a SCSI drive and controller. The OS
was wiped but I have a PPC version of OSX 10.3 I was able to
install...but the machine will not boot.
Also have various drives with OS9 already installed that I tried and
none will boot.
I removed the SCSI drive and got the thing working with an ATA drive but
I'd really like to know how to get it to boot from SCSI.
When I re-attach the scsi drive I can mount it and read the data
I found this info but it did not work Command-Option-Shift-Delete-# Boot
from a specific SCSI ID, where # is 0 through 6
Not really important, just more a matter of curiosity
thanks
The System Preferences panel would have an item for "Startup"
which sets what to boot from. If both the IDE and the SCSI
disks were installed and actually working, then *both* OS
options should be detected by this menu. It would take a
second or two, for this to enumerate the possibilities.
I had a fairly large number of "bogus" entries here, which
would not actually have booted. As the detection method
used simply assumes "if it has a Blessed folder, it's
a candidate". The two on the right in this picture, would
be booting straight to Classic. With your two disks, you might
end up with two entries similar to the left-most one.
http://lowendmac.com/wp-content/uplo...werPC-10.2.png
For your 10.3 (I have the disc for that), it would include
both Classic MacOS 9.x as well as MacOSX 10.3, and the Startup
allows actually booting in Classic directly, or running MacOSX
(with Classic running in a VM). 10.3 would be the last OS
with both these options - it's the reason I bought my G4,
is to have the "most compatible Mac" at that point in time.
+-------------------+ +----------------------+
| MacOSX 10.3 | | Boot into 9.x direct |
| | | +----------------------+
| | |
| (Runs 9.x as a VM)|
+-------------------+
If you were able to access the SCSI drive while booted
from the IDE, then chances are your termination and
ID number setting are OK. I don't think my G4 has any
SCSI disks in it, and my PTP 250 running at 500MHz,
was the last one with dual SCSI chains and seven drives.
The G4 only had the two drives, and I installed an
Acard IDE card to try to wire up faster IDE for
my drives. (I might have had to add some KEXT for that
card.) At that point, I was pretty fed up with
the "SCSI tax", to be bothering with that stuff,
as it really doesn't buy you anything. Maybe
you'd need an active terminator on the end of the
chain, or maybe the drive had an auto-terminator
in it.
The advice here says to hold down Option to see
a built-in startup menu at the OpenFirmware level
(the BIOS). I don't know if I've ever tried that
on the G4. I always used the Startup panel for
setting the next OS to use. I used to boot to
Classic to use the 2906 SCSI card for the scanner,
then boot back to MacOSX to actual edit the scans.
And that's because of the two SCSI cards I owned,
one only had a driver for Classic, one had a KEXT
for MacOSX or something. Too many details, too long
ago... All I can tell you is, to my surprise, the
G4 still boots, even though the clock battery died.
What's supposed to happen is there would be NVRAM
trouble, if you lose settings in that thing. If
I were to try to start the PTP (PowerTower Pro)
today, its battery would be dead too, and it
definitely would lose the NVRAM and have no way
to deal with the 500MHz G3 accelerator installed in it.
And then I'd have to crack the manual and figure out
the voodoo again, to get it to go. By comparison,
the G4 box has been a Saint.
http://www.dummies.com/computers/mac...rom-a-dvd-rom/
Paul