At 9:12 AM +0100 12/1/04, Aur=E9lien G=C9R=D4ME wrote:
>
>Unfortunately, I have no legacy MacOS. My sole MacOSX runs only on
>a laptop with no floppy drive.

If you can set up the OS X box to do tftpd, you can use

http://www.dialectronics.com/bootloader/boot25g.xcf

to do tftp booting of both the bootloader and the installer. The same
syntax as one would use for netbooting works

boot enet:,\boot25g.xcf netbsd****

I modified the NetBSD derived OpenBSD xcoff bootloader to use tftp instead
of NFS. It's not compatible with NetBSD GENERIC installs, but does work
with the INSTALL and MD kernels.

As to the rest of the problems with your model, the documentation seems
sparse as to the reasons for the problems that are encountered. Some of
them should be easily identified, like "CLAIM FAILED" messages, which are
almost always indicative of the image loading process attempting to claim
memory already in use by OF, but are also occasionally caused by a problem
with calculating the end of the kernel image file (and thereby attempting
to allocate a nonsensical amount of memory). After receiving this message,
in the OF prompt do

dev /memory .properties

and examine the "available" field.

As far as the particular boot commands that will work, I didn't see where
anyone had examined the bootr word.

see bootr

The 0 preceeding this command is a parameter to the bootr word, so it might
be instructional to see what bootr does with it. It is also instructional
to know the load, boot, and init-program words.

see boot
see load
see init-program

Another aspect that would be nice to know is whether or not your model can
do telnet sessions into OF. Everything from OF 3.0 and on can, but Apple's
documentation is vague on when they implemented this. I have seen a
reference to the telnet package that indicates it wasn't originally called
that, so it may be present on models earlier than Apple says it definately
is.

dev /packages ls

Any package listing "telnet" is the telnet package and is exceptionally
useful for session capture when debugging problematic models.

http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn2004.html

The other reference

http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn2023.html

says look for "Ethernet" as the package for earlier G4s. I do not know what
was in the New World (color) G3s, but as your model was one of the last
with serial ports, it would not be unreasonable for Apple to have begun
testing the network debugging sooner than they announced it.

If neither are present, you'll need a serial connection for session capture.

tim