On Thu, 5 Jul 2001, Donald Lee wrote:

> I have a beige G3 w/ OF 2.4 that I have yet to get booting with any
> flavor of NetBSD.  My OF 1.0.5 machines and my B&W G3 (OF 3) boot fine.
> The only way I have managed to boot the OF 2.4 machine is to swap
> out the ROM stick for an older (OF 2.0.1) boot ROM.

	Out of curiosity, does the machine actually report OF 2.0f1 or
2.0.1 when you enter OFW after changing the ROM DIMM? I'm beginning to
suspect that OFW is actually stored somewhere else on the board instead of
on the ROM DIMM. While the ROM DIMM contains the MacOS ROM *only*. I
believe that the ROM DIMM boots the system, initializes devices to some
primitive state, and then passes control to OFW, which then loads what you
tell it to. BTW, there are also three different ROM DIMMs known for the
Beige G3. Search in http://www.macsales.com in the support area and you
should be able to find pictures and descriptions of each of the chips.

> It appears that regardless of what I try, booting from HFS/IDE, HFS/SCSI,
> CD, netboot, or floppy, nothing gets very far.  I've done best

	That's because you can't boot HFS on old world machines. It only
knows how to load from ISO-9660 an MS-DOS floppy (which won't work on your
machine) or the raw disk (`boot ide0/@0:0')

> with the netboot, where it finds the ofwboot.xcf and then dies with
> CLAIM FAILED.

	What's your LOAD-BASE and REAL-BASE set to, and are you using a
new version of ofwboot.xcf. For a while there was an old copy that was
compiled to load at an incorrect address when netbooting. Load should be
600000 and real should be F00000. Then reset-all to make sure the changes
go into effect. Getting netboots to work correctly on old world machines
has been known to cause you to pull your hair out.

> My question: I'm reading on this list that OF 2.4 can be made to behave.
> Is this verifiably true?  I have gotten indications in the past that this
> machine may be hopeless, but recent list traffic indicates that it can
> be made to work.

	Yes. Have you tried using system disk or new versions of Startup
Disk that patch OFW?

	With the Rev B ROM DIMM in my Rev 1 Beige G3 desktop, I can
consistently boot from SCSI, IDE, and floppy.



	Chris