At 3:27 PM -0400 10/16/00, Ethan Preston wrote:
>1) Rebooting and pressing OF option-command results in a blank 
>screen and no input.

How sure are you that your input is ignored?  Did you try typing bye 
or mac-boot to get back to MacOS and fail, for instance?  If you got 
a blank screen but input is OK than that's information.

>2) Working on the assumption that 1) I got into OF but 2) a serial 
>console is required, I attached a PowerBook Duo, ran Kermit in 
>terminal mode, set up the modem stats for 384000 8/N/1, booted the 
>Umax and went into OF. Nothing--the serial console doesn't work. I'd 
>appreciate someone telling me what I'm doing wrong here.

Did you try both serial ports on the Umax?  I wonder if the Umax 
configures the serial ports differently?  I assume that you have used 
the Duo setup elsewhere and are sure of your cable, etc.

>3) I am able to set bootvars to always going to OF and I 
>consistently get the blank screen/unresponsive 
>monitor+keyboard/power on combination that I am

How are you able to set the boot variables if SystemDisk doesn't 
work?  I've had good luck with the BootVars program, and bad luck 
with the SystemDisk program.  BootVars is a bit lower level, but it's 
a more direct interface to Open Firmware.

>assuming is an open firmware prompt. I am not able to get the 
>SystemDisk to do the same thing. (Obviously, if I could, I might be 
>able to set OF to use the screen and the kbd.) Starting up, 
>SystemDisk complains that I do not have Mac OS X; attempts to save 
>in the first screen meet with failure. Save as file in advanced 
>options produces a file, but does not produce an effect when 
>restarting. (The file is on the desktop; if this is the problem, 
>please let me know where it should go.)

Save as file produces a custom settings file which can be used to 
restart SystemDisk and restore some custom configuration.  You still 
have to save the settings to OF nvram as a separate step.  It's 
handy, but it's not what you want, yet.

If I were you I would try playing around with BootVars where you can 
set the input and output device explicitly and try to get OF working 
with the serial console.  Until you get that far it's a bit hard to 
debug what's going on.

>Many thanks, your help is much appreciated.


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