I recently acquired a slab. I'm not totally new to black hardware but it's been a long time.
The thing boots but looking at the console, it says it's looking for a NetInfo server (timeout looking for local NetInfo server). Doesn't matter if I'm plugged into eth0 or not, it never times out (or didn't after 24 hours at least).
I can Ctrl-C through a bunch of this stuff but eventually it won't proceed with booting.
I attempted to boot into single user mode but I get an exception #3 with a memory address in the ROM monitor.
What's my best course of action to get this thing booting? From what I see, it seems that NeXTSTEP is on the drive (it's supposed to be 3.3) but it's configured in a way that it wants a NetInfo server I don't have. Since I can't seem to boot into single user mode, how stuck am I?
Should I try to setup a Mac to net boot off of and install NS/OS fresh?
Any help is appreciated, I'm sorta lost.
According to my archive, Exception #3 indicates RAM trouble. It may be caused by wrong order or mixture of parity and non-parity SIMMs, un-even number of SIMMs, damaged SIMM, ... Many years ago we usually solved this by re-ordering or replacing SIMMs.
When exception #3 is resolved and you are able to start into single user mode you can take a backup of folder /etc/netinfo (e.g. to /etc/netinfo.old) and then replace /etc/netinfo with the default Netinfo folder /usr/template/client/etc/netinfo.
This will wipe out all Netinfo information from former setups.
Quote from: "nuss"According to my archive, Exception #3 indicates RAM trouble. It may be caused by wrong order or mixture of parity and non-parity SIMMs, un-even number of SIMMs, damaged SIMM, ... Many years ago we usually solved this by re-ordering or replacing SIMMs.
When exception #3 is resolved and you are able to start into single user mode you can take a backup of folder /etc/netinfo (e.g. to /etc/netinfo.old) and then replace /etc/netinfo with the default Netinfo folder /usr/template/client/etc/netinfo.
This will wipe out all Netinfo information from former setups.
Ah, interesting. Thanks for the tip! I'll try swapping some SIMMs around and report back.
I suppose this error can also happen if RTC chip lost it's ram configuration. You may try to remove the battery for a while, this will force a full reset of the clock chip.