Open firmware screen of death

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jjrossjjross
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Help! After upgrading to 10.2.2 this morning and downloading the lastest iomega drivers for my Dual G4 450 Gigabit-Ethernet and restarting I get the long tone and then the open firmware screen comes up. I type the standard "mac-boot" command and then all I get is a frozen grey screen? Does anyone know that the hell I did wrong? and it was probably me. Help!

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 6
    noseynosey Posts: 307member
    I just spent four hours rebuilding my system from a simliar 'apple attack' the problem was, I just installed 10.2.2, only to watch the whole system come to a shuddering stop.



    I normally have two partitions, and was able to save the larger by installing a system on it, but I lost everything on the other because my last attempt was to erase the partition and install it cleanly...



    Guess what... that didn't work either. But instead of the gibberish (which looked like a binary graphic dump) I did get the no system sign (think of a no smoking sign, but no cigarette and the circle slash is in grey)



    I am erasing the hard drive (again) and will see if I can find something to check the blocks.



    The only thing I can think of that would cause this (maybe) is having installed the ATI updated consumer drivers a few days ago. But that seems to be stretching things.
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  • Reply 2 of 6
    dmgeistdmgeist Posts: 153member
    [QUOTE]Originally posted by jjross:

    [QB]Help! After upgrading to 10.2.2 this morning and downloading the lastest iomega drivers for my Dual G4 450 Gigabit-Ethernet and restarting I get the long tone and then the open firmware screen comes up.



    OK wait! Why are you updating firmware in X and from iomega?The only firmware you should ever use is from Apple, and firmware should only be updated in OS9.
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  • Reply 3 of 6
    defiantdefiant Posts: 4,876member
    dmgeist, it's a problem! he didn't intended to get to the OF screen.



    nosey: keep us updated
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  • Reply 4 of 6
    noseynosey Posts: 307member
    I seem to have managed to get things working, but I do have a rather severe complaint for Apple. Let me know if others find this a bit, well... concerning.



    Say you have two partitions. You have a system on one, but it goes bad. You reinstall the system, but you have updated it through the Software Update, so it's newer than the one you are installing. That won't work, so you install the system on the other partition. Erase some files on the other to clear the old (newer but corrupt) system. Reinstall and poof, up and running with no problems, and systems on two disks, right?



    Nope. There is a big 'No Worky' sign that comes up. So you boot from the cd to restart to the other system on the other partition. Right? Nope. You can only boot to a partition from the CD if you have installed from the cd onto that partition. So guess what... on to reinstalling over a perfectly good system, only so I can boot from the safe partition.



    Does anyone else find this to be incredibly pigheaded? I am sure there is a way to boot holding down a key or two which will give you the option, but with my luck that is somewhere on the 'help' files on the internet.



    Can I make a bootable Jaguar CD which will allow the option of booting from a selected volume instead of just the one the CD copies to? I have had this problem in the past, with the public Beta and the first released X. At those times I could just pop in the OS9 cd and ignore the installation to clean things up and set the restart volume. Jeez do I miss that...



    gerry... no wait... nosey... Aw, ferget it... just gerry... nosey gerry...



    I must get more caffine...
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  • Reply 5 of 6
    jjrossjjross Posts: 6member
    I didn't update the firmware. I use the SW update to download 10.2.2. Then noticed that my Zip disks were no longer being recognized. I then booted into OS9, downloaded the lastest drivers from Iomega for OS9. Booted back into X, downloaded the Iomega drivers for ten and restarted. At this point it still didn't work so I pulled out the Hardward tester CD from apple just to check if the Zip had a hardward problem. It checked out fine. I then tried to restart into X and the Open firmware screen keeps coming up at start-up. I tried the mac-boot command and it hangs on a grey screen after I hit enter. I then tried to use the open firmware commands reset-nvram and reset-all. It restarts and still goes back to the open firmware screen and still hangs after I type in mac-boot. Anyone have any Ideas on what to do. How can I reformat my HD if I can't get past the open firmware screen? <img src="confused.gif" border="0">
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  • Reply 6 of 6
    alcimedesalcimedes Posts: 5,486member
    you should be able to hold down the "option" key to boot off whatever drive you want.



    as for the open firmware screen of death, that's really odd. just to keep things simple, have you tried unplugging your zip drive? if i were you, i'd start with the zip drive, then move down the line, take out excess ram, start unplugging drives. odds are one of them is causing the conflict, and unplugging it will fix it.



    also, how long have you let it sit after typing the mac -boot command?



    if you have the time, i'd leave it at the grey screen for at least an hour, just to see if it works its way through.



    i had a PC puke on me once, the only way i could get it to boot was to reformat it. turns out that if i'd let it try booting for about 4 hours it would have gone though.





    oh, and btw, i'm using the updated ATI drivers here with no problem.
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