Subject: Re: 6500 will not boot when Sonnet G3/400 is active.
From: Timothy A. Seufert (tas@mindspring.com)
Date: Tue Oct 16 2001 - 22:20:34 MDT
At 5:23 PM -0700 10/16/01, pete wrote:
>Did you ever get any good responses to this one? I'm about to try installing
>YDL on an 8600 with a Sonnet upgrade processor...just wondering if there's
>anything I should watch out for!
With an 8600, you don't have to worry about anything but enabling
your G3's backside L2 cache.
It's not that it's a Sonnet upgrade -- it's that the 6500 and related
systems will always have interesting problems with a G3 upgrade
installed, because they were not designed to have the CPU upgraded.
Instead of replacing the original CPU, the upgrade card plugs into
the L2 cache slot. When you turn on the power, the original CPU
still boots the computer. For the purpose of booting MacOS, the
vendor supplies an extension which stops the MacOS boot partway
through and reboots with the G3 active.
As you can see this is more or less a total hack job. Users of that
kind of upgrade can expect to have problems getting them to work
under operating systems other than Classic MacOS, and frequently will
have lots of stability problems caused by the hackish nature of the
hardware. (Sometimes they'll work OK in a bare machine but have
nasty interactions with certain PCI cards, etc.)
-- Tim Seufert
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Tue Oct 16 2001 - 21:31:31 MDT