Out of boredom, I tried booting NetBSD on a spare external disk I
have lying around on my Q900. I was surprised, because I tried it a few
months ago and booting caused the computer to just automatically reboot,
as if I had rebooted normally. This time I actually got a console! Woo,
progress!

	Anyways, most things looked fine... it was correctly identified as
an Apple Macintosh Quadra 900. I'll give the strange boot messages I got
(since I'm just looking at the screen right now and would have to type it
all out. I can type it all out of someone wants the full boot message)

[after adb0 at obio0]
adb: using IIsi series hardware support
adb: cleanup: (length=0x2):  0xff  0x03
adb: no devices found

[sound, monitor sense/grf init, onboard ethernet fine]

[finds both SCSI busses, scsibus0 and scsibus1 along with esp0 and esp1]
[finds the disks on both the internal and external busses just fine]
[serial ports fine]
[after nubus0 at mainbus0]
nubus0: failed to map slot 9, address 0xf9000000

[sensed but didn't initialize my QuadraLink serial port card, like normal
(slot b) sensed and initialized my ethernet card fine]

[after boot device sd1 and root on sd1a dumps on sd1b (wrapped)]

sd1(esp1:2:0): esp1: timed out [ecb 0x104909e (flags 0x1, dleft 0, stat
0)], <state 2, nexus 0x104909e, phase(l 93, c 100, p 3), resid 0, msg(q 0,
o 0) >

then it seems to hang, but then the above error pops up again (while it
continues to try to write to the disk) and the error repeats every couple
minutes until the machine hangs.

	So, other than the ADB and SCSI, it looks like the Q900 will at
least come CLOSE to booting. That and the PDS slot.

	Dropping into the debugger totally hangs the machine, or seems
to... then again, the keyboard isn't sensed, so it wouldn't respond
anyways ;-)


	The machine is a Q900... 1 gig internal SCSI disk (all MacOS),
250MB external SCSI disk, 20MB RAM, QuadraLink serial port NuBus card,
NuBus ethernet card. There is a Syquest drive and a CD Rom attached but
not powered on. Works fine under MacOS... the Syquest is 1st on the
external SCSI chain, at SCSI 3, the 2nd drive is 2nd at SCSI 2, and the CD
Rom is last at SCSI 6, terminated.

	Hopefully this helps somewhat. Has any work at all been done on
the Q900/950/IIfx lately? I guess some at least... I could have sworn that
one time I tried booting and it would just reboot the machine rather than
going into the NetBSD console... If yes, any guesses on how close we are
to at least a serial console bootable Q900? I'd love to have another
NetBSD machine! ;-)
	
	Ryan
	


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HELO... my name is rewt... you have SIGKILLed my father... prepare to vi!