G4 Titanium - booting from cardbus?

[Philgood]

Experiment time.

I have a Magma expansion pci box here where I installed a sonnet 2xSATA pci card into and a 2TB harddrive. I created 10 partitions of 190GB roughly and installed 10.4 osx on the first partition.

I can select the fresh installed OS within the preference panel as it gets recognized but when I reboot i get the question mark and it boots back to the internal harddrive.

So i started to look into open firmware to maybe forcing it to boot of from cardbus.

Has anyone done this before?

[SDG]

All I can remember is that Apple removed booting from PCMCIA/Cardbus starting with the Lombard, so OF might be missing a driver for the Cardbus hardware. The Lombard is the first New World notebook, so OF got an upgrade from what went before and the boot process changed from using  OF/Toolbox to just OF.

[Daniel]

All I can remember is that Apple removed booting from PCMCIA/Cardbus starting with the Lombard, so OF might be missing a driver for the Cardbus hardware. The Lombard is the first New World notebook, so OF got an upgrade from what went before and the boot process changed from using  OF/Toolbox to just OF.

That does indeed highly suggest that OF never had a cardbus driver.

Can we take a look at the OF device tree for the laptop?

[Philgood]

Sure!

[refinery]

is it possible you might have to "fool" the hard drive into thinking its actually a PCMCIA with the appropriate boot drivers? I seem to recall when I made my Wallstreet bootable off PCMCIA I had to jump through hoops and there were a whole lot more invisible partitions containing drivers on the drive than a typical hard drive had. the only way I was able to get them to copy over was using dd in a terminal window on osx... And it was only in terminal that I could even *see* those invisible partitions. This could be a red herring though as that was a Wallstreet.

[SDG]

Wallstreets boot off PCMCIA just fine. No hoops to jump through. All you have to do is make sure your ATA compatible drive in the PCMCIA slot is formatted with APM and HFS(+) and has a blessed System Folder. The only extra step you need to do from a cold boot is the four finger salute at the chime (Cmd+Opt+Shft+Del) to make it bypass the hard drive on booting.

[rvense]

I'm fairly certain I've booted my Lombard off CF in the PCMCIA slot. I've since moved the card into an IDE adapter, but I'm quite sure I've done it.

[refinery]

sorry, i probably didnt word that right... what im getting at is the drive he's trying to boot off of needs to be tricked into formatting like its a cardbus drive, because the cardbus drives get extra boot partitions that are not present on a regularly formatted HD

[Philgood]

Interesting. Wouldn't know yet how to approach that though.
Could someone say how a harddrive connected through the cardbus does present itself to OF so I could start to manually recreate it?

[refinery]

i gotta dig through my archives cuz it was a few years ago since I did this, however i'll report back.

this might be of some useful info, this is about people using CF cards in the cardbus slot as a boot volume and it says "G4 powerbooks with a cardbus slot" ... i would think the process would be no different.

https://lowendmac.com/2002/flash-memory-improves-powerbook/


also, what model TiBook is it? DVI or VGA model?

[refinery]

i havent forgotten about you sir. I'm just having the damndest time tracking down the tool I use that broke down all the weird device driver things in the OS9 partition map. Once I find that again I can re-create the process I used.

also never heard back from you on which model of TI this is... VGA or DVI?

[Philgood]

Hi, nice you didn't forget!

It's the DVI model.