by I'm having a strange problem with booting and installing the LinuxPPC 4.0
release and I'm hoping someone might be able to help me find the cause.
My configuration:
PowerMac 7500 with 176 MB of RAM and a G3 accelerator (250/166/512)
running System 8.5. VM is disabled.
Internal SCSI bus:
525 MB disk at address 0
12X CD (Apple) at address 3
External SCSI bus:
DAT tape drive at address 0
4 GB disk at address 1
1.65 GB disk at address 2
4 GB disk at address 3
Zip drive at address 5
PCI:
Voodoo 2 card
The 4 GB disks on the external bus (addresses 1 and 3) are configured as a
stipped volume for MacOS. I intend to use the 1.65 GB disk (address 2)
exclusively for LinuxPPC. The machine works flawlessly and all of the disks
are formatted with the FWB Disk Toolkit 3.0 and pass all diagnostics and
performance tests.
I managed to get the LinuxPPC 4.0 release installed on the 1.65 GB disk
once, before I modified the machine to get it into its current configuration.
Linux ran fine for several days and I was very pleased. I powered the machine
down to do some other work and when I powered it back on, it refused to
boot LinuxPPC again. It complains about an illegal SCSI command while it
is polling the SCSI bus during booting, attempts a SCSI bus reset and hangs.
I figured I screwed up the file system or something important so I attempted
to reinstall, booting from the floppy as indicated on the CD. It fails with
the same problem. I tried using BootX. I still have the same problem but
before it hangs the SCSI bus is reset twice (instead of once).
I've checked everything I can think of and cannot find a reason for anything
to be wrong with the SCSI bus or any of the peripherals. I reformatted the
1.65 Gb disk (low level format) and performed media scans for bad blocks and
cannot find anything out of specification on the drive.
I can contribute that while rearranging the configuration I did loose the
contents of my NVRAM (the battery had to be removed). Also in the previous
configuration there was nothing at address 3 on the external SCSI bus.
Anyone have any ideas how I should proceed?
mark