Hi all!
My wife and I held a special presentation and exhibition yesterday in the Milpitas CA public library. Our show took attendees through a guided tour of Apple history, including some historically-significant related companies like General Magic, Be, and of course, NeXT. After the presentation we invited everyone to get hands on with our collection, including our beloved NeXT Cube. We'd done this same event in Cupertino a couple weeks ago and it was great, except we couldn't get the Cube to power on at all - it wouldn't click, fans wouldn't spin, etc. - it was effectively comatose.
That night I spent some time troubleshooting and determined that it apparently drains a 2032 coin cell (
https://www.tindie.com/products/siliconinsider/nextbatt-cr2032-lithium-battery-replacement/) much faster than the original battery - good to know! Replacing the dead 2032 with a new one immediately resolved the problem, so I took the new battery out and planned to insert it just ahead of showtime for our Milpitas event.
Unfortunately, when I replaced the battery yesterday, the Cube did power right up, but it got trapped at a "Loading from network..." screen, which of course could not be completed. In other words, it no longer even attempted to boot from its internal SCSI2SD drive. I did some frantic Googling and found a couple unrelated posts that soon led me to a solution, so I thought I'd share here what I learned in case anyone else encounters this same problem:
If the battery is replaced and the system powers up but gets stuck at "Loading from network," do the following:
- Power down
- Power up again while repeatedly pressing Command and ~
- Once you reach the firmware prompt, enter the letter p for Parameters
- In the Parameters section, type sd and press enter, and then proceed through setting the boot parameters (just press enter to accept the defaults)
- Once finished, power down
- Power up machine and it should load as normal
That's it! Not exactly brain surgery, but definitely something that I would never have known intuitively as a relatively new/casual NeXT user. Hope this is helpful for someone else someday!
Huxley
PS I'm really proud of the exhibition we put together - here's a pic from just before we opened the doors and welcomed everyone in:
https://imgur.com/a/Xdy2kps