I have a 25mhz 68040 NeXT cube with dimension board ,
with a wiped original ST41650 drive (scsi ID 1).
the unit has no FD
I have connected an original NeXT / Sony CDU-541-1n trayloading CD drive
and a new, original, NeXTStep 3.3 install CD, the SCSI bus is terminated.
The issue is ..
I can't boot from the CD , as long as its set to scsi ID 2 or up,
bsd(1,0,0) results in "no SCSI disk"
I can however boot from the CD, if CDDrive is set to scsi ID 0.
I can run the installer, and it installs up to the point that it will ask to restart the unit. If i restart, the install sequence starts over.
If I switch SCSI ID of the CDDrive (to ID 2 or up) at the restart point , it gives a few errors, like
MOUNT : giving up on : NEXTSTEP_INSTALL
it will hold at "mounting remote filesystems"
I have tried SGI , SUN and apple optical drives that would just not "see" the
disk or give weird SCSI errors .
I have been struggling with this for a week now.. and I am out of ideas..
Please tell me what i am overlooking .
Axel
I'm surprised that the install process works at all without the boot floppy. If i understand correctly it only does when the CD drive is set to ID 0.
On reboot it always tries booting ID 0, which in this case leads to loading the installer again.
You told that it partially booted to installed HDD after setting the ID of the CD drive to something other than 0. I guess you set ID of the HDD to 0 at that point? That would make sense.
It looks as if then something gets confused with the changed IDs during the boot process. Maybe you need to fix fstab manually. That could be done from single user mode. Unfortunately i don't know the details on how to do that.
thank you for your response..
since the HD was set to ID 1 , i left it like that .
i understood from this forum that the SD0 is just the lowest available SCSI ID
and SD1 the next one up ..
but since the optical drive is only usable on ID 0 .. i hoped i was making a mistake somewhere ( i usually do )
Axel
I see. Maybe it just boots the lowest ID that responds. You could try to leave the CD drive at ID 0 and on reboot break into the ROM Monitor and boot the HDD with the command bsd(1,0,0).
Edit: I just saw you tried something similar. Getting "no SCSI disk" is strange. I would not expect that. Maybe retry.
The floppy loads a bit of extra code for the bootstrap process. Without it the installer does some really weird things. Either you copy the CD to the hard drive or you find a floppy drive.
dear Pentium & Andreas,
I found a floppy drive .. and it does make a huge difference ..
it installed after booting from the floppy .. (bfd)
I thought , since the cube did boot from the CDdrive, it didn;t need the floppy .. i was very wrong..
Thank you for your help !!
Axel
I think that only the Turbo machines (ROMs) are able to boot directly from the CD...
I have a similar problem as above, but more hardware limited.
First, how do I tell what kind of cube I have? I don't see a model number on motherboard. The back panel say Model N1000 and I can't see the processor since its covered with the heatsink and thermal paste (didn't want to pry it off). I'm guessing 68030.
The cube used to work but haven't turned it on in a couple years. I hear the hard drive spinning but then get a "Default Boot Device Not Found". I did find a jumper plug loose inside the case...maybe I knocked it off.
I have an IBM DORS-32160 HDD and that's it. No, floppy or CD drives to boot from. I do have a NS 3.3 CD if I need to reload. But, I'll have to find a suitable CD drive first. Maybe one from an Apple machine?
Question: What is the proper jumper placements? 7 & 11 were in place and I have the one loose jumper. I tried with it on #6 (SCSI TERM ON), but that didn't work either. Or is my HDD toast? :)
Thanks!
If you have a heat sink and the RJ45 connector, it's an '040 cube. If you have only 4 memory slots, and a heatsink with a frame, it's a turbo cube.
Sounds to me like your NVRAM needs to be reset. I would take out the motherboard, remove the battery for an hour or so, then boot the machine. Shortly after booting, type cmd+~ to get into the boot rom, then try typing 'bsd' in order to boot from the HDD. While there you might also type 'p' to change the setting... I always enable verbose booting and SCSI, sound out etc. test.
I don't know what I just did, but it worked. I typed in bsd as you said and it worked.
BUT, now I'm stuck at the login screen! Time to search other posts for an answer. LOL!
bsd -s will take you into single user mode, and from there you can change the password for users
LOL! Oh boy, so I did the bad-s thing but then got a line about erase intr kill and I didn't know what to do so I went back to just bsd and kept guessing and guessing. root and root got me in!
But then, I discovered my mouse didn't work in the vertical direction (x?) I took it all apart and all looks good so a little confused. Horizontal works fine so I'm thinking it has to do with the little roller on the inside of the mouse at the bottom.
On a side note, I see on the ROM screen I have a 68040 33MHz Turbo with 64MB RAM. And since it actually logged in as Root, I can see the Menu item User management. Just can't get to it. LOL!
The adventures in classic computing continue.
Very cool! Turbos are very hard to find. Rob from Black hole has mice very cheap right now, so you might check on that. Otherwise it's likely that the rotary encoder is bad.
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Brian
I don't know why I'm writing this...it's almost funny. Luckily I have two mice, so I checked the other one too and same thing. That leads me to there being something wrong with the keyboard. So I open that thing up and I may have found the culprit! :) Inside, behind the mouse plug is a little circuit board and a ribbon cable that then goes to the keyboard. Well, there are two little points where the solder has separated from the board. I think I'll just reflow the solder and see what happens!
These machines are definitely showing their age. The good thing about the older technology though is that there is very little that can't be fixed with a soldering iron and some patience.
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Brian
Yep...so I found my multimeter and started testing the connections and found that it wasn't what I thought, although I did reflow the solder on the two connections, but rather a trace on the little board was bad too. I couldn't draw a bead of solder that small on it, so I just used conducting glue. I'll find out tomorrow after letting it cure for a while.
Meanwhile, I tested my second keyboard and it doesn't work but the mouse plug, board and ribbon all tested good. I think it has to to do with the power button. I guess I'll troubleshoot that while I wait.
It's good when you have two of one thing to test. I figured out that both mice work just fine, it was the keyboard's mouse plug circuit board that was bad! And on the other keyboard, it was the cable that goes from the keyboard to the monitor!
So I took the good cable, the good keyboard and both mice...works as designed! I think the bad cable is probably just where the wires go into the plug harness and the circuit board, well, I know what's wrong with that...a bad trace on the board and some bad solder joints. Have to do some micro miniature repair!