[d_oob]

has anyone ever run into this weird thing where when you start up your machine the first thing that appears is a repeated line that reads:

can't open: can't open: can't open: can't open: etc. etc.

it'll keep doing this for about 30-40 seconds and then continue start-up as normal.
I thought it was an OS9 situation but I've reinstalled the OS on a different harddrive
and I still get the same thing.

Very strange. Any clue what this is?

thanks

ian

[Catfish_Man]

If you cancel an OSX install on a beige G3 (so you ran the installer, but don't have OSX installed) it'll do that. Mine did it for a while, until I actually installed OSX.

[d_oob]

That's bizarre. The thing is that i tried installing OSX on it a while back, months ago. (The machine is an upgrade from 266 to OWC's Mercury 450MHz Zif)) But for some reason the processor won't accept the upgrade. So in the middle of installing OSX I aborted. But that was months ago. And according to my friend, who owns the machine, the "can't OPEN:" thing just started happening recently.

And the other weird thing is that I reinstalled OS9 onto a different harddrive, different from the one i tried to install OSX on. So are you saying that there is some kind of weird imprint on the CPU itself? Like it remembered that I tried to install OSX?

This is a really strange occurence.

Thanks for the info though. Anyone else got an idea?

[reader50]

Zap PRAM or give it a CUDA-switch reset. Whatever it "remembers" has to be in either the PRAM or the hard drive.

[djohnson]

Also it can be an IDE conflict. In OS X you actually have to set the IDE drive to Master, Slave, Master w/ Slave, etc... I figured this out when I installed my cdrw. Hope this helps!

[d_oob]

Originally posted by reader50:
Zap PRAM or give it a CUDA-switch reset. Whatever it "remembers" has to be in either the PRAM or the hard drive.

tried several times to zap PRAM. Whenever anything goes wrong, ZAP. But that doesn't seem to help this problem. What is the CUDA-switch reset? I will try djohnsons suggestion of checking IDE conflicts.
There are 3 SCSI drives and the stock IDE drive. Maybe just getting rid of the IDE drive altogher and just using the SCSI drives might work.

thanks again for the possible fixes.

[Catfish_Man]

Where is openfirmware stored? I've seen this screen and it really looks like an OF thing.

[d_oob]

Originally posted by Catfish_Man:
Where is openfirmware stored? I've seen this screen and it really looks like an OF thing.

hmmmm.... where could it be stored? in RAM? Even if a ZAP P-ram would that still
be stored? I erased all harddrives (zeroed them)

what is openfirmware?

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by d_oob:
hmmmm.... where could it be stored? in RAM? Even if a ZAP P-ram would that still
be stored? I erased all harddrives (zeroed them)

what is openfirmware?

Open Firmware is the Mac (and Sun) equivalent of the BIOS on PCs. It's a really basic system that it uses to start up the main system.

[d_oob]

Originally posted by Catfish_Man:
Open Firmware is the Mac (and Sun) equivalent of the BIOS on PCs. It's a really basic system that it uses to start up the main system.

so the OF is something embeded into the processor? Sorry if i don't know the structure of my hardware. The OF makes sense now that i know what it is. But as far as where it is stored and how it may have gotten corrupted, that's beyond me.

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by d_oob:
so the OF is something embeded into the processor? Sorry if i don't know the structure of my hardware. The OF makes sense now that i know what it is. But as far as where it is stored and how it may have gotten corrupted, that's beyond me.

Crap, I just remembered. Beige G3s don't have OpenFirmware, at least not as it's implemented in newer machines. Not sure what they do have, try googling.