[gbhgbh]

I was playing around with Open Firmware and now my computer won't boot anymore. I entered OF by holding Cmd + Optn + O + F during bootup, then entered 'reset-nvram', then entered 'reset-all'. Now when the computer boots, I get the grey screen with the apple logo for a few seconds, then I get a circle with a slash through it. The computer stops at this point. The computer is a Lombard Powerbook with MacOS 10.3.3. How can I get this to boot into MacOS X again?

[Art Vandelay]

Hold Option while booting and see if a bootable device appears. If it does, select it and boot from it. If it boots successfully, reset your startup disk in System Prefs. If no bootable device appears when holding Option, boot from your Panther install disc and select Startup Disk from the Installer menu.

[gbhgbh]

Thanks for the help. Holding the Option key did not bring up a list of bootable devices, however booting from the installation CD did allow me to select from bootable drives--which worked. Do you have any idea of why this happened?

[theolein]

Playing with OF is for the bold and the foolish. The entire thing runs a Forth interpreter (you may have discovered this while playing with it, for instance by typeing: "4 4 +" at the prompt which will duly spit out the answer "8") and it stores all the hardware variables, such as device address etc and the boot device (If you type "printenv" at the prompt, one of the variables listed will be the boot device). If you overwrite one of those variables, which is pretty easy to do, especially the boot device, the machine will not boot. The boot device can be reentered manually, but it's a pain.

It's a very good idea to read Apple's documentation on OF before messing around with it.