Nekochan Net

Sigh. Is there any way to find out what the boot-device entry should look like with a G4 laptop?

All I have right now is:



Obviously, nothing is getting this system back up at the moment.

(How I got here is annoying enough: I cloned the dive on my laptop with Carbon Copy Cloner via setting the laptop in target disk mode and attaching it to a machine running Tiger, erased the drive to HFS+J, and reinstated from the image with CCC. Now, no boot. Grey screen, then a no-smoking icon appears on the screen. Only without the cigarette.

(Booted into open firmware, reset the pram and reset-all, and still nothing. I guess that's where I am now.

(Oh, yeah: CS3 obliges the drive you're installing onto to not be HFS+XJ, hence all of this.)

If push comes to shove, I guess I can try to find the Leopard install media. No idea where it is at this point thought. Guess I could just buy another set.

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Scott Elyard coherentlighthouse.com
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hd: is usually an alias to the harddrive's open firmware path.

My guess is you borked something when cloning the drive. The boot loader is, I think, in a different partition. I don't know CCC but if you just cloned the partition and then reinitialised the whole drive with that, then it won't work.

As a side-note, I once got an old LC III (68k) running by mounting a SCSI drive on my Power Mac (PPC), formatting it, and manually copying over the system folder. Makes you think...

Well, CCC did say the reinstatement was bootable. Guess not.

This brings my success rate of reinstalling from bootable backups for OS X to 0%. Of course, 2 may not be statistically significant.

Wheee.

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Scott Elyard coherentlighthouse.com
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That's what it should look like for an internal ATA drive.

Question: to make the backup, did you attach the target (backup) drive to the machine that was being backed up, or did you take the original drive out and make the backup from a different machine? The reason I ask is that the boot loader format is different for x86 machines than for PPC machines. Maybe the boot loader is in x86 format?

(I've used CCC a bunch of times for bootable backups & never had a problem, although backup/restore machines were all the same architecture.)

Hm. Well, the machine running Tiger is an Intel machine (the G4 obviously isn't), but the disk never left the laptop. I used the laptop in target disk mode via firewire.

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Scott Elyard coherentlighthouse.com
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Carcharodon Helicoprion Paradoxides

When in Target Disk Mode, your computer is basically a very white, very expensive enclosure, so there's no way to tell what system the disk is attached to. CCC running on an Intel machine will probably have assumed that it was creating a bootable drive for such a computer.

Ahhhh.



Dang.

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Scott Elyard coherentlighthouse.com
Sarcosuchus_imperator Liopleurodon Pachyrhinosaurus
Carcharodon Helicoprion Paradoxides

Welp, found the leopard DVD. Booted it up, set the startup folder to the one on the HD and everything just works now.

Success!

If a bit qualified. The lesson here is... always have your boot disk handy. Or possibly something to that effect.

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Scott Elyard coherentlighthouse.com
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Carcharodon Helicoprion Paradoxides

That's a good one! Thanks for sharing the solution. I've run into issues with selecting startup drives before, but not in your context. Added to the bag'o'tricks.

You're welcome!

I wonder if this trick works with any boot disk, not just leopard-specific.

Also: is it just me or is the PROM sutff on a Mac completely opaque?

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Scott Elyard coherentlighthouse.com
Sarcosuchus_imperator Liopleurodon Pachyrhinosaurus
Carcharodon Helicoprion Paradoxides

On the contrary. It's just a Forth interpreter. Forth might be unfamiliar in its stack-based nature, but it is quite simple and logical when you get the hang of it, and as far as firmware goes it's very powerful, both for monitoring and setup, and allowing, for example, for platform (CPU) independent ROMs in e.g. PCI SCSI controllers and networking cards. Very few devices have these, of course, but that's just the tech industry being its usual stupid self...

...


Is that good?

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Scott Elyard coherentlighthouse.com
Sarcosuchus_imperator Liopleurodon Pachyrhinosaurus
Carcharodon Helicoprion Paradoxides

Forth is very slim and very powerful (in being Turing complete). As such it's a very good starting point for an extensible firmware. IMO.

I don't think it's Leopard specific. Booting from an installation CD/DVD and then setting the startup disk from there has been known to cure some states of system confusion long before MacOS X came out. My comment was only meant to indicate that I had not needed to do this when I've done CCC mirroring. Maybe I was lucky. (Or maybe I just forgot what happened.)