Blue and White SCSI 2 Drive Issues

O

OldReliable

New Tinkerer
Jan 2, 2025
13
0
1
Hi All,

I am trying to get my blue and white to boot with the original Ultra2 SCSI drive installed. So far, all I can get is for it to hang on a grey screen with the cursor there.

Background:

The Blue and white will boot properly from OSX or OS 8.6 or OS 9 partitions on an SSD bridged onto the internal IDE Bus. Currently FW only works in OSX but I am working on that.

It boots fine with just the card in there, and I was able to update the card firmware in 8.6 using the updater on macintosh garden.

When I plug the drive and cable into the PCI SCSI Card the computer hangs on boot. I reset PRAM and NVRAM too.,
  1. if I hold CMD-OPT-SHIFT-DELETE, I get the finder folder question mark before it hangs.
  2. If I hold C it hangs on boot.
  3. If I hold X no dice.
  4. It will go to Open firmware but I don't know what I am doing there.
What do I try next?
 
phunguss

phunguss

Active Tinkerer
Dec 24, 2023
289
258
63
Stillwater, MN
Is your SCSI chain properly terminated?

Have you booted holding down the option key (should get a blue screen boot picker)? Select the internal SSD, boot up then verify the SCSI drive is good by checking it from the SSD operating system. If you go into startup disk, does the SCSI show as a valid option? Maybe you need to reformat the SCSI drive and reinstall the OS.
 
O

OldReliable

New Tinkerer
Jan 2, 2025
13
0
1
B&W don’t have boot picker in their OF. It’s one of the issues making this such a pain!

The scsi chain is properly terminated so that’s not an issue,
 
O

OldReliable

New Tinkerer
Jan 2, 2025
13
0
1
phunguss said:
Boot from a CD? Do you have any external firewire devices or other machines? Or try a USB stick.
Click to expand...
it won’t boot from either its original restore CD, a macos9 cd, or anything else as long as the scsi HD is plugged into the card! Even OF hangs at “please wait”

this blue and white yearns for the scsi2 drive she was shipped with. As long as it’s plugged in, she won’t look at another drive. It’s maddening
 
J

joevt

Tinkerer
Mar 5, 2023
85
35
18
phunguss said:
Do you have any external firewire devices or other machines? Or try a USB stick.
Click to expand...
B&W G3 can't boot USB or FireWire.

OldReliable said:
B&W don’t have boot picker in their OF. It’s one of the issues making this such a pain!
Click to expand...
You can invoke the text based boot picker using the multi-boot command.
On later Macs, that command is graphical based, and multi-boot-menu is text based.
https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?thr...-booting-from-usb-from-the-boot-picker.48601/
 
J

joevt

Tinkerer
Mar 5, 2023
85
35
18
OldReliable said:
You are correct, but the machine hangs at “please wait” after I hit multi-boot!
Click to expand...
The process takes a while. If you enable some debugging options (such as by using the setenv AAPL,debug-bootpathsearch command) then it might show what it's scanning during the process. Newer version of Open Firmware may have different names for the debug options or more debug options.
If you use telnet to access Open Firmware, then it could hang when scanning for network boot options.
The aliases node has a no-boot property which I guess is a list of paths to skip while doing the boot path search process. The default value for B&W G3 is created using this code:
Code: 
" /pci@80000000/pci-bridge@d/mac-io@5/fdc" encode-string
" /pci@80000000/pci-bridge@d/mac-io@5/scsi" encode-string encode+
" /pci@80000000/pci-bridge@d/mac-io@5/ata-3@21000" encode-string encode+
" no-boot" property
 
O

OldReliable

New Tinkerer
Jan 2, 2025
13
0
1
joevt said:
The process takes a while. If you enable some debugging options (such as by using the setenv AAPL,debug-bootpathsearch command) then it might show what it's scanning during the process. Newer version of Open Firmware may have different names for the debug options or more debug options.
If you use telnet to access Open Firmware, then it could hang when scanning for network boot options.
The aliases node has a no-boot property which I guess is a list of paths to skip while doing the boot path search process. The default value for B&W G3 is created using this code:
Code: 
" /pci@80000000/pci-bridge@d/mac-io@5/fdc" encode-string
" /pci@80000000/pci-bridge@d/mac-io@5/scsi" encode-string encode+
" /pci@80000000/pci-bridge@d/mac-io@5/ata-3@21000" encode-string encode+
" no-boot" property
Click to expand...
Now we’re talking! How do i tell which dev alias is the scsi drive and how to I tell it to ignore it?
 
J

joevt

Tinkerer
Mar 5, 2023
85
35
18
You said it hangs with the cursor on a gray screen. I think that is beyond Open Firmware after a boot device has been chosen.

None of the default items in no-boot is a PCI device.
There's no dev aliases for the PCI slots except for screen which points to a graphics card or a child device of a graphics card if the graphics card has more than one output.

You can find your PCI card in dev / ls or dump-device-tree

It's going to be one of these:
Code: 
/pci@80000000/pci-bridge@d/@2
/pci@80000000/pci-bridge@d/@3
/pci@80000000/pci-bridge@d/@4
but it's going to include a device name before the @2,3,4 unit addres.

But first I would try:
Code: 
setenv AAPL,debug-bootpathsearch
multi-boot
To see where it hangs.
UPDATE: see correction below at #13

You should get a serial port adapter for the modem port to make Open Firmware hacking easier.
 
Last edited:
O

OldReliable

New Tinkerer
Jan 2, 2025
13
0
1
Thank you very much for your help here! I’m going to try this all tonight.

The machine has the stock ultra2 scsi pci card that it came with in there, which is why I was asking about a pci slot.

When I go through open firmware and do multi-boot it hangs at “please wait”

When I boot holding C or comnd option shift delete, it hangs at the grey screen with the cursor.

When I unplug the scsi drive it just works!

I’ll update after I try this tonight.
 
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