Subject: Progress Report (Installing YDL 1.2.1 on dual-G4 SCSI)
From: Stephen R. Anderson (sra@bloch.ling.yale.edu)
Date: Wed Nov 08 2000 - 20:20:41 MST
When I wrote last, I was getting nowhere trying to install YDL CS
1.2.1 on my new 500 MHz dual G4 (with internal SCSI). Since then, I've
made progress....in the same way (to quote an old paper by Bert
Dreyfuss) the first cave man to climb a tree "made significant
progress toward getting to the moon." But maybe someone else can
benefit.
When I try to start up from the YDL install disk, all I get is a brief
gray screen followed by a black screen. No prompt. And nothing I type
at it gets anywhere. But it seems that what is going on here has to do
with the video driver. Eventually, I tried the following: Boot into
OF, and then at the OF prompt do "boot cd:,:tbxi" This gets the yaboot
prompt from the cd, which offers various choices. Having read the
manual, I know that my cinema display wants "novideo" so I choose
install-novideo" at the yaboot prompt. This actually gets the kernel
and ramdisk image to load, and the installer to start up. At this
point, I learned that it wasn't responding to my USB keyboard at all,
so I played around for a while with what device (keyboard or mouse,
nothing else) was plugged in where. I found that if I plugges the
keyboard into the USB 1 port (not USB 2!) on the G4, and plugged the
mouse in to the keyboard (nothing plugges in to the USB ports on the
cinema display), I could get it to see that I was typing at it.
OK, so now I got it to go through the first couple of steps of the
installer. But when it got to the drive setup part, it claimed I had
no disks at all, so it couldn't set one up for me. Skipping the
catch-22 that sets in at that point, what's going on is that the
kernel doesn't support the SCSI card shipping in current dual-G4 scsi
boxes: ATTO,ExpressPCIProUL3D. From other mail, I know that a previous
version (U2LD) is supported, but not what Apple sent me (thanks YDL,
by the way, for responding to my mail about this with the suggestion
that I get a supported card like an Adaptec 2940UW - even if I could
afford a few hundred dollars to downgrade the scsi performance in my
machine, that card isn't sold any more).
So I am at a dead end, as far as getting this machine to work, until
some kind soul somewhere writes a driver for the scsi card.
But when I do find such a driver, how will I use it? It took me a
little while to work out that I can put a set of the install stuff
(yaboot, bootscript, yaboot.conf, vmlinux, ramdisk.gz) in the first
mac partition on my drive (at root level) and then boot with that from
OF using "boot (long OF address of boot device derived from
printenv),yaboot" with an appropriately edited version of the
yaboot.conf file (that is, one pointing to the relevant fiels by their
OF addresses). By that method, I managed to boot with an SMP kernel
(2.2.18pre-something from Eric Lowe) instead of the one on the
CD. Much to my delight, I saw two penguins when booting with that one,
but once the installer started up, nothing I could do would get it to
accept input from my keyboard.... And in any event, this kernel
doesn't support my scsi card either. Just useful as a proof of
concept.
Question: why is it that when I do get the files on the CD to work,
yaboot complains about "wrong partition 1 signature" (while no such
error message appears when I boot from files on my mac partition)?
And of course my big question is, when is there going to be support
for this scsi card? But I don't really expect an answer to that.
--Stephen R. Anderson
Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science (Chair)
Yale University
Box 208236 Yale Station
320 York Street
New Haven, CT 06520-8236
Phone: (203) 432-2456
<stephen.anderson@yale.edu>
http://www.ling.yale.edu/~anderson/
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