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Oddly Behaving G4

VMSZealot

Well-known member
I have a G4 Digital Audio - which is behaving very oddly.  The specification, for reference and in case this has a bearing on matters, is that it has 1GB RAM, DVD-RW, Zip 250, a Sonnet Duet 1.6GHz accelerator, Sonnet SATA card (with a 500GB SATA drive attached), Maxtor 75GB hard drive, Maxtor 110GB hard drive, ATI Radeon 9000 Pro (the official Apple upgrade), Sonnet USB 2 card, Adaptec SCSI card (originally from my old 9600), and a generic 802.11g Wifi card.

By and large my old Mac works perfectly.  It'll boot Leopard 10.5.8 and run stably (although a little noisily) for days on end.  Ditto Tiger 10.4.11 (and the classic environment).  It'll run MorphOS without raising a sweat.  But I'll be damned if I can get it to boot MacOS 9.2.2 - which, of course, I want to run some of my favourite old games (Carmageddon 1 and 2, Star Wars Racer, Deus Ex).  

It starts booting OK.  But right at the point when the inits and cdevs stop loading and it hands over to Finder, it hangs.  Mouse pointer stops moving.  It gives up.  Which is frustrating.  And it doesn't matter whether I'm trying to boot from the OS 9 install for Classic on my Tiger disk or a freshly formatted disk (with OS9 drivers and without Journalling) - or even from the original OS 9 install disk.  Whatever I do, the result is the same.

I've tried removing all the expansion cards, disconnecting all the USB devices except for the keyboard and mouse, resetting PMU and PRAM.  Nothing makes a damned bit of difference.  I'd reinstall the original processor - except that I don't have it anymore, and I'm sure that I read that the Duet is OS 9 compatible.

Am I missing essential drivers?  Does anyone have any suggestions?  What have I missed here!?

 

Unknown_K

Well-known member
Try installing the OS9.2.2 image from os9lives on a separate drive connected to the built in IDE ports and see what happens.

Dual processor G4 upgrades install new firmware to work and OS 9 might be having issues with this.

 

Bolle

Well-known member
The Mulitprocessor Plugin is the issue. You have to remove that from the system folder and it will boot up fine afterwards.

This is normal with Sonnets 7447 upgrades. There will only be one CPU used in OS9 then. There also was a patched CPU plugins file around somewhere but I don't know if this enables the second CPU or if it just disables some check or something that gets it to crash.

 
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VMSZealot

Well-known member
The Mulitprocessor Plugin theory sounds interesting.  Where is this plugin?  It's not loose in the System folder AFAICS, nor in the Extensions folder.  What's it called?

 

Bolle

Well-known member
There should be a folder called Multiprocessing either in the extensions folder or on the top level of the system folder. In there you will find the CPU Plugin file which you need to remove.

 

VMSZealot

Well-known member
And the prize goes to Bolle!  Thank you - you're a top bloke and all round diamond geezer who definitely knows where his towel is.  My G4 is happy again!

 
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