Help please, boots to circle with slash through it.

[snooziums]

Okay, here is my dilemma. I have a Blue & White G3 Rev. 1 mainboard. It had an SCSI card and an older video card (not in the video slot, though). It also has a SCSI Yamaha 4x4x16x CD burner.

When I boot up from Mac OS X 10.2, it shows an Apple character for a few minutes with the spinning circle under it. Then it slows a circle with slash through it where the Apple logo was, and the circle keeps spinning.

What could be wrong? I tried resetting the NVRAM; however that did not help.

Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

 

[Quartz Extreme]

What is your complete configuration?

RAM....Hard Drives....Video card...etc

I'm asking because the Rev. 1 motherboards had issues with larger hard drive sizes on the motherboard ATA.

 

[Eniregnat]

I thought that was the symbol for lost media/ and or no bootable drive.
Have you tried booting through the 10.2 CD (reset and hold down C)?

Look at the drive. Repair premissions, but it is likely that you will have to reinstall OS if it is signifantly screwed. (If you have a bootable hardware test CD, try that and look at the drive.)

 

[snooziums]

No, there are no hard drives attached, I am booting off the CD drive.

It has 256 MB of RAM.

 

[Quartz Extreme]

No, there are no hard drives attached, I am booting off the CD drive.

It has 256 MB of RAM.

Have you been able to boot off the SCSI CD before?

OS X can be very picky about SCSI.

 

[mischief]

Have you been able to boot off the SCSI CD before?

OS X can be very picky about SCSI.

Bingo.

The "not" symbol usually indicates an incompatible or boot-ineligible drive. It's quite possible that you'll need an ATA CD-ROM drive to boot from. I have this itch at the back of my mind that leads me to think that your machine will work fine with SCSI HD's but will want it's CD-ROM on the usual ATA bus for booting. Google under "Macintosh Factory Manuals. There's usually at least one site you can grab the AppleCare manuals from for older machines. They usually have this sort of errata in them.

Good luck and don't give up! We'll help you sort this out.

 

[snooziums]

Is there anyway at the Open Firmware prompt to force it to use a SCSI drive? I do not have an IDE drive laying around, and if I did, plugging one in would mean that I would have to unplug the hard drive, thus defeating the function.

*sigh* This is so very confusing, and complicated.

 

[spinne1]

Is there anyway at the Open Firmware prompt to force it to use a SCSI drive? I do not have an IDE drive laying around, and if I did, plugging one in would mean that I would have to unplug the hard drive, thus defeating the function.

*sigh* This is so very confusing, and complicated.

Getting a CD drive with an IDE interface is really quite easy (and cheap). Ebay is my first choice for price. Or look at the ads from computer stores, they will likely have some sort of cheap CD IDE drive. Go buy one and then you can boot from it. As for hooking up the hard drive, you can either hook it up on the same IDE cable as the CD (two per cable, one master, one slave), or buy a second IDE cable and hook it up to the other controller spot on the motherboard and make them both masters.

 

[mischief]

Is there anyway at the Open Firmware prompt to force it to use a SCSI drive? I do not have an IDE drive laying around, and if I did, plugging one in would mean that I would have to unplug the hard drive, thus defeating the function.

*sigh* This is so very confusing, and complicated.

Erm.... If the machine came with an IDE drive to begin with (default config) than there's a seperate ATA bus cable harness tucked ito the drive frame assembly for the CD and Zip. This cable connects to a second onboard ATA bus. The older your New World Mac is the more it behaves like and Old World Mac.... In this case it means that when you tell the mobo to boot from a CD via the C key it looks to the second IDE bus at whatever the Master is and tries to boot from that. The same is true if you were to hold down the "D" key to force it to boot from an installed ATA drive.

A troubleshooting map is coming to mind....


Try this:

Zap PRAM using "Apple-Option-P-R" on restart. Gotta be quick or it doesn't take. Hold down the keys until your Mac chimes 2-4 times just to be sure.

Restart holding down "Option" key while OS X.2 is in the CD ROM drive. This may take a while..... It forces your Mobo to go out and find all bootable System folders and then list them graphically. click on the CD's system icon. Click the right arrow. This should boot you from the CD if possible.

If this doesn't work you'll need either the AppleCare/Factory manual to tell you what the rules are for SCSI boot drives or an EIDE CD ROM drive.

There's usually specific PCI slots that your video card and, more importantly your SCSI card should be in for bootability. The above mentioned manuals should get them for you.