Can't boot from CD, or second (OS9) HD

daledidit

Registered
Hi all;

I've got a G4 graphite tower (Sawtooth) w/756 Mg of RAM and a upgraded (daystar, 1.5g hz) processor. I've got two 80 gig HDs -- one running OS X Tiger, and the other running 9.2.2.

I was working in 9.2.2, when Earthlink's registration-and-modification application kept causing a hard freeze. I had to power down a few times, but it always came back up without obvious problems. In my attempt to solve the Earthlink problem, I zapped the PRAM. Then when I started up, it booted to the Tiger HD. "No problem," I thought, I just selected 9.2.2 as my new start-up disk, and hit restart.

That's when the real problem started: It never restarted in OS 9: It just gave me a blank screen and no start-up chimes.

I reset the NVRAM through open firmware, and when it rebooted, it came up on the OS X Tiger HD. I tried again to select the OS 9 HD as my new start-up drive, but when I hit restart, it did the same thing as before -- no boot, no chimes, no video, no nothing.

Reseting the NVRAM again gets me back to the OS X HD and that seems to be working fine. I can look at the OS 9 HD, but I can't boot from it. The other interesting wrinkle is that I can't boot from a CD either. After a successful shut down from OS X, I start up, holding down the C key, and get the same "nothing" that I got before. This also happens when I select the CD as the new start-up disk.

Things I've already tried:

• I tried booting from a CD
• held down the CMD-OPT-SHIFT-DELETE-# to specify a start up disk
• pressed the PMU button on the mother board
• The battery is fine, but I'm stumped.

Any hints that any one could offer would be very appreciated.
Thanks,
Dale
 
OK,

I talked to Daystar, the people that upgraded the G4, and here's the deal: the upgraded processor natively runs OS X only. When I was trying to boot from a CD, it was a OS 9 based CD, so that wasn't happening either. The solution was to simply run the patch that came with the computer (so deeply nested on the OS X hard drive, that I hadn't noticed it), so that the processor would run OS 9.

There ya go.
 
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