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New World Sad Mac Equivalent?

Juliet Elysa

Well-known member
Hi all. :) The Wikipedia article about "Power-on self-test" talks a little bit about the Macintosh POST. It says this about Macs after 1998:

"In the event of an error, but not a fatal hardware error, they display the same screen as seen when holding ⌘ Command+⌥ Option+O+F at startup but with the error message instead of the "0 >" prompt"

I'm assuming the article's correct, since the in-line citation for that statement is a page on the Apple website (the link doesn't work, it seems :( ).

My question is, does anyone have a picture of the screen and a list of possible errors? I'm having issues getting the prompt to show up on my blueberry iMac (it's probably operator error, I seem to encounter a lot of those these days ;) ) and I'm curious. Honestly I've been wondering about this for several months to a year, and it literally just occurred to me to post something here. :lol:

Thanks! :D

 

Sherry Haibara

Well-known member
I don't have a picture of that screen, but I've seen one in some occasions - it's actually the standard Open Firmware interface that was built in with every PowerPC Macintosh after 1998. 
You can see some footage of Open Firmware in action here!
 

 

Juliet Elysa

Well-known member
Ah yeah, that makes sense with the O+F in the key combo. :p Is the error instead of the prompt the only difference between the OF screen and the crash screen?

 

Sherry Haibara

Well-known member
Yep, I would say so. The typical error message that's shown is something like "DEFAULT CATCH! code: fffffff6 %RR0: ff80b260 %SRR1: 0000b030": the code indicates the type of error encountered, while the following part of the message is the hexadecimal representation of the content of a few PowerPC registers, if I recall correctly.

There's little documentation on Apple OF errors, actually!

 
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