How to 'soft' disable internal HD?

[dubbz]

Is there any way to disable the internal hard drive of the Powerbook without opening the Powerbook and yanking out the cables? I Googled a bit, but couldn't find a way to do it using OpenFirmware

The drive is more or less dead, and is causing some issues when booting from a Linux LiveCD. I'd rather not open the PB until I have a new hard drive I can replace the dead one with...

 

[mkrishnan]

I can't vouch for this... But from this site of instructions:

http://www.firmworks.com/QuickRef.html#Device Aliases

There should be a persistent alias (in NVRAM) that refers to the hard disk. You should be able to use devalias to find it (it looks like it's probably "disk") and then use "nvunalias disk" (or whatever) to get rid of it. This should persist unless the NVRAM is reset.... Or you can recreate the alias using nvalias in the same fashion, I guess....

Does that make sense?

 

[dubbz]

Thanks.

Does that make sense?

Yes... Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work.

I type "nvunalias hd", and it's still on the list when I do a "devalias", or when I reboot.

Tried the same with "pci2" (supposedly the one the hard drive use). Same thing.

Tried a couple of others too, just to verify, and the same thing happens. Or, rather, nothing happens.

Edit: Update -- Tried "cmd-opt-shift-delete" which is supposed to:

Bypass startup drive and boot from external (or CD). This actually forces the system to NOT load the driver for the default volume, which has the side effect mentioned above. For SCSI devices it searches from highest ID to lowest for a partition with a bootable system. Not sure about IDE drives.

Didn't work.

 

[mkrishnan]

Not that this makes any more sense...but what about if, rather than deleting the hd alias, you try to overwrite it with the path to the optical drive? So that both the optical drive dev and the hd dev point to the optical drive?

 

[dubbz]

Not that this makes any more sense...but what about if, rather than deleting the hd alias, you try to overwrite it with the path to the optical drive? So that both the optical drive dev and the hd dev point to the optical drive?

Tried it, but it didn't work...

Fortunately, it seems like the LiveCD actually boots... there's just a major delay before it moves on in the boot process. Guess I'll just have to live with that for a while.

Thanks

 

[mkrishnan]

I guess perhaps Apple disabled all these OF features? Hmmm....

Glad you got the LiveCD working, Dubbz.

 

[mrichmon]

Edit: Update -- Tried "cmd-opt-shift-delete" which is supposed to:

Bypass startup drive and boot from external (or CD). This actually forces the system to NOT load the driver for the default volume, which has the side effect mentioned above. For SCSI devices it searches from highest ID to lowest for a partition with a bootable system. Not sure about IDE drives.

Didn't work.

Try just holding down "opt" to bring up the open firmware boot partition selector.