Installing OSX on Umax S900

ihafro

Registered
Has anyone had any luck getting OSX PB to install on a Umax S900. When i restart with the OSX Cd in the drive, the machine will show a happy mac, restart, and then the screen will go dark. I have to remove the OSX CD then rebot and zap the pram to get it to boot again.

Any suggestions? How about a URL to some kind of guide. Maybe wishfull thinking?

Robyn Lyons

Umax S900 w/ Powerlogix G3/350 (orig. 604e/180)
112MB RAM
20.5GB Western Digital ATA/66 HD
USB PCI Card
IXMicro Twin Turbo 128 Video
IDE PCI Interface Card (has HD on it)
12X SCSI Apple CD-ROM (from old PM6500/250)
100MB SCSI Zip Drive
 
As I recall from my unsuccessful attempt to get an early release of Darwin running on my old S900, the (semi-insurmountable?) problem is that the S900 identifies itself as a Power Macintosh 8500 (or 8600... I don't remember exactly), which would be OK except for the fact that the 8500/8600 has built-in motherboard video hardware, which the installer then decides to try and use... Being that the S900 _doesn't_ actually have motherboard video, things go pear-shaped quite quickly from that point on.

Whether it will ever work, I suspect, depends on whether anyone of the outside developers working on the Darwin kernel has an S900 they'd like to run OSX on. I wouldn't count on seeing a fix for this from Apple.

You'd also probably need a kernel extension to handle that ATA/IDE card, too, from what i've been hearing from others.

I've got a G3 upgraded S900 with an IDE card too, but for now it's mostly functioning as an MP3 jukebox under 9.04...

[Edited by marmoset on 12-05-2000 at 06:31 PM]
 
AHHHHGGG. That's not the response I was hoping for:)

Thank you though, I didn't know about the video problem and I may have a fix. I'll try and let everyone know how it comes out.

Robyn J. Lyons
 
I've also got an S900 and am disappointed that OSX is not yet supported on this venerable machine. I'd be especially interested to see what the SMP support in OSX does with the older multiprocessor machines like this.
 
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