My school was throwing it out. It looks to have been an original 030 machine with the newer motherboard swapped in. It works, but the HD appears to be dead as it dumped me into the ROM Monitor when it tried to boot. (It needed replacement anyway, as it's one of those double-height 5.25 monsters that must've cost a fortune back in 1988.) There's no floppy drive either; it still has that optical cartridge drive.
Me and a friend would like very much to be able to get this thing running again. Any advice? I do have access to a wide variety of old SCSI stuff; mostly HDs and CD drives. I might be able to get access to a SCSI floptical drive; could that be used to boot the machine off of those boot floppies that are on Apple's site? How do I get my hands on a copy of NeXTSTEP without shelling out $100+ on eBay?
Well, seeing as you don't have a copy of either NeXTStep or OPENSTEP maybe you could check out NetBSD (there is a NeXT port
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/next68k/). There are some limitations as to hardware (if I remember it cannot support Turbo equipemtn, but shouldn't be an issue with a cube...), but none the less it's an easily accessable free option to test out the system before you would sink any money into it. Download the OS, install one of the HDs and rig up a Cd and you could be in business. Hope this is an acceptable solution and gets that cube running. Good luck and let us know how your project develops.
first try to look for some older scsi disks.. you want the ones that can operate async... Ive read that almost all scsi II disks will, but you will need a shim type thing. I got my shim's on ebay for like $7 a pop. Also booting 3.3 on a v66 cube requires a scsi floppy.. Alhtough I read on here that you can just dd the install cd to another disk & boot directly to that disk. Failing that there is always netbooting...
Good luck!
I've been wondering- Since I need to boot from a floppy before I can install anything off CD, and since I don't have a floppy drive for this machine, could I get away with imaging the boot floppy onto a Zip disk and booting from that?
Quote from: "Computolio"I've been wondering- Since I need to boot from a floppy before I can install anything off CD, and since I don't have a floppy drive for this machine, could I get away with imaging the boot floppy onto a Zip disk and booting from that?
You know that is crazy enough to work. As long as its a scsi zip drive.
If that doesnt work, just dd the 3.3 cd to a 450+mb scsi disk, and boot from that. The nextstep CD's are UFS's images, not ISO9660, so windows will not mount them.
Quote from: "neozeed"Quote from: "Computolio"I've been wondering- Since I need to boot from a floppy before I can install anything off CD, and since I don't have a floppy drive for this machine, could I get away with imaging the boot floppy onto a Zip disk and booting from that?
You know that is crazy enough to work. As long as its a scsi zip drive.
If that doesnt work, just dd the 3.3 cd to a 450+mb scsi disk, and boot from that. The nextstep CD's are UFS's images, not ISO9660, so windows will not mount them.
So would dd'ing the floppy to the SCSI Zip perhaps?
I was shocked when I heard of the CD to HD trick. I used to have to resort to installing 3.3 off of my cube's optical drive. Talk about slow.
Quote from: "neozeed"The nextstep CD's are UFS's images, not ISO9660, so windows will not mount them.
Some special kind of UFS... I can't get Linux or Mac OS X to mount them. :?
Quote from: "ash"Quote from: "neozeed"The nextstep CD's are UFS's images, not ISO9660, so windows will not mount them.
Some special kind of UFS... I can't get Linux or Mac OS X to mount them. :?
I think it's actually BFFS (Berkeley Fast File System), not UFS.
But that doesn't explain why Linux or Mac OS X wouldn't recognize them, unless maybe it'd require a filesystem driver that isn't installed.
Linux can mount them, assuming you have UFS support (in-kernel or module loaded). You have so supply an option though, -o ufstype=nextstep (or nextstep-cd or openstep... this is from memory, consult the man page for mount to be sure; look in the section under UFS).
It can only mount hard drives read-only, however.
I remember being able to mount a NEXTSTEP 3.3 CD under Linux a while back. I created the mount point /mnt/cdrom, then issued the command
mount -t ufs -o ufstype=nextstep-cd /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
I haven't tried mounting a hard drive with Linux, but I remember seeing the note in man mount about it being read only.
I've been working at it for a while, but haven't had much success. I imaged the boot disk to a floppy and a Zip disk, and tried the floppy in a floptical drive (didn't work, but the floptical I found is probably dead anyway), a TEAC SCSI floppy drive (which almost worked), and the Zip drive(didn't work either).
Also uh, the CD I have in my possession says NeXTSTEP 3.3 Developer. Is that an actual installable version of NeXTSTEP or is it just a CD full of dev tools? Either way, I tried imaging it to a SCSI HD but the cube won't boot from that either.
I've been using RawWrite and DD For Windows (
http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/rawwrite/dd.htm). I don't care so much that the SCSI floppy and zip drive methods aren't working, but I am a little flabbergasted that the HD imaging trick isn't working. It was NTFS-formatted at first, but should that even matter when you're using DD?
If this is happening due to a bug/shortcoming in the Windows DD, can I use a Knoppix CD or some other compact, bootable version of Linux to copy the CD image over to the SCSI HD?
I've figured out that the CD I'm supposed to install from was labeled "intel" when in fact it was for both X86 and NeXT boxes. I know, real smooth.
I found that for Windows machines, Active@ Disk Image (
http://www.disk-image.net) can do the imaging job quite nicely. I put the CD image on a FAT32-formatted drive, booted from a floppy with the disk image program on it, and was able to copy the CD image over the HD. Once attached to the NeXTCube, it was able to boot from it.
The weird part is that the Darwin kernel that's on the install HD will try to use the unformatted HD as root or something and crash. I moved the startup HD to a higher SCSI ID than the install HD and that stopped it from crashing, allowing it to get roughly halfway into the install process. It'll then loop that first half over and over. Since it restarts at the end of the first half, maybe it'll go through the second half if I change the startup HD's SCSI ID back to something lower than the install HD.
Any idea why it's trying to use the unpartitioned HD as root?
Finally got it to install! It's working perfectly now. It turns out that according to the manual (
http://www.channelu.com/NeXT/NeXTStep/3.3/nsa/), there's a way to make the disk you're trying to boot use it's own root directory instead of trying to use one on the first HD it finds.
I'm glad you made it! Yeah I guess we should have pointed out that the x86 is actually the CISC cd with m68k & x86 on it. Just like the RISC cd has SPARC & HPPA on it. The 3.3 developers cd has all platforms on it.
At any rate, happy NeXTing!