Ken Wellsch wrote:
> 
> Having been through a similar experience a week or so ago, I do
> know where you are coming from.  I bought a mac clone (a UMAX S900)
> which had virtually no peripherals (just floppy) and I have no OS
> media.  I wasted a frustrating evening thrashing away with a Mac I
> do own with MacOS on it and after a lot of headaches and hassles got
> the two floppies made.  As it turned out, they were a total waste of
> time.  The S900 will not allow the System Tools to update the OF.
>

I started on this on Monday....  You must be a lot smarter than me.
 
> So being a serial console kind'a guy (e.g. my alphas) I just used the
> keyboard sequence to get into OF, used my favorite serial tool kermit
> to chat with the box, set the needed OF env values then just booted the
> NetBSD/macppc install floppy which thanksgoodness *can* be dd'ed using
> a real OS (NetBSD).
> 

I'm in a jam there now.

I've got two 'bootable' disks.  One is the bootable ISO image for 1.5.1,
and the other is the boot.fs disk.  I also set up a local bootptab to 
try netbooting.  More on that later.

If I "setenv boot-device fd", the disk spins and spits.

If I try to set up the CD-ROM, the whole system just laughs.

If I use 'boot whatever', the system ignores me extremely effectively.
The scariest part there is that the tftp seems to be trying to work,
but the bootp is failing.  I see the bootp traffic in the TCPDUMP, but 
not the arp.  I think it's a MAC address thing.

Basically, I can't boot anything but the MacOS fixit disk.  I can, 
however, boot that at will. :-)  I can't eject it or do anything with 
it, but I can boot from it.

> I don't have a working video (this box like the 9500 is clones does
> not come with built-in video) card, so I just chat via serial when
> needed and normally via ssh over the network.
>

I'm just a rube here, but wouldn't just about any PCI video card 
solve your primary problem? 

Working seems to be a relative term in MacBSD land.  The documentation 
I've D/Led for the machine indicates that it should be able to use the
el-cheapo monitor that is setting on top of the box right now.

I'm going to try and 'blind-mouse' my way around the screen and see
if I can't accidentally get the video mode into a position I can use.

> I suppose the 7600 is so broken in its OF you'd not get this to work,
> but it should be easy to try and cost no money B^)

Actually, it's tantalizingly close.  It acts like it might TRY to 
boot every once in a while, and I am seeing things that I expect
to happen happen.  Maybe I'll get another set closer tonight.

Wish me luck.  I'll probably post my success flag when I finally
get frustrated and quit again tonight.

Who knows, it could just be a bad floppy.