[rescue] Mac Hints needed

[Tim H.]

On Sun, 2 Nov 2003 22:06:18 -0600
Mike Hebel <nimitz at nimitzbrood.com> wrote:

> On Sunday, November 2, 2003, at 09:56 PM, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, Nov 02, 2003 at 08:18:01PM -0500, Steve Sandau wrote:
> >>> Command->Option->Shift->Delete on power-up.
> >>>
> >>> A PIA but it will cause the system to ignore the internal drive
> >>> completely and boot from _any_ other bootable device.  If it fails
> >to>> boot from the CD I'd question the CD status.
> >
> > I don't know if it's still valid, but you USED to be able to just
> > hold C
> > down on boot to force a CDROM boot.
> 
> He tried that and it still tries to boot from the hard drive.  This 
> method forces it to ignore the internal drives for the boot process.
> 
> Mike Hebel
> _______________________________________________
> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
> 
Actually, Delete+Option+Command+Shift (DOCS for those of us who require
mnemonics for these arcane combinations) does not ignore internal
drives.  Originally that command caused the scsi bus to be searched in
reverse order,  from Device 7 to Device 1 to find a valid system file,
now it just reverses the normal boot seek sequence on IDE, which isn't
quite as nice and numerical as scsi was.  I am not at all sure of boot
order when you throw in things like USB and Firewire.  In the pre-G days
the time outs were quite slow on the search sequence, I have no idea how
slow a CD drive will work in this day of obscenely fast hardware.  The
hold C to boot CDROM obviously is a bit newer, because it didn't work
until CDROMs were standard equipment :-)

Tim