[geeks] Problem booting G3 B&W

[Ido Dubrawsky]

I recently got a G3 B&W PowerMac for the private school my kids go to (one of 
the teachers uses Macintosh and so they bought this and I'm in the process of
getting it going).  

It's got 640MB of RAM, a CD, a Zip Drive, and a 6.4GB Maxtor hard drive.  It
booted up just fine the first day but now it won't recognize any drives except
for the CD (I can boot into the MacOS X installer and that's about it).  It's
running OpenFirmware 3.X and the default boot-device is set to:

hd:,\\:tbxi

which is the default (I set it to that value after zapping the PRAM when it
started having boot problems...before it was set to ata0...something -- I can't
recall).  I've tried the installer again but it doesn't see the drives.  I've
also tried other ATA disks (including a new Western Digital 120GB disk).  I've
also tried new ATA cables but to no avail.  I WAS running just fine until I 
shut it down once (when I first got it off ePay it did take a while to find the
boot disk -- I got the '?' folder several times before it finally recognized 
the disk -- now I just don't get anything).

Anyone have ideas?  Should I send it back to the seller and request a 
replacement Mac?  Should I try an ATTO SCSI card and drives first?  Suggestions?
I'm not as familiar with the Apple OpenFirmware stuff as I am with the SPARC
OpenBoot (although I understand they're fairly similar if not nearly identical).
Is there any command in OpenFirmware which will list the connected drives 
(kind of like probe-scsi or probe-scsi-all)?

Ido
-- 
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Ido Dubrawsky, CISSP           		E-mail:          ido at dubrawsky.org
Network Security Architect			   idubraws at siliconsec.com
dubrawsky.org
500 Hermleigh Rd
Silver Spring, MD. 20902
(301) 651-5441 (cell)
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