Sonnet Encore 1GHz G4 in Gigabit G4 - OS X ✅ OS 9 ❌

[Gothikon]

Hi,

I’ve a PowerMac G4 gigabit model with:
- Radeon 8500
- 60GB M2 SSD with some adapters to work on the internal IDE bus
- 1GB RAM (2x 512MB DIMMs)
- a SCSI card
- stock optical drive and a zip drive
- firmware 4.2.8f1
- No PRAM battery

With the stock Apple 400MHz CPU:
- Everything appears stable in OS 9 and OS X i.e. clicking around and running apps for an hour without anything crashing

With the Sonnet Encore 1GHz G4
- OS X is fine, browsed the web for 15 minutes
- Classic in OS X is fine, installed some apps
- However, OS 9 will not boot consistently.

9/10 when trying to boot OS 9.2.2. it gets stuck before the happy mac icon. I get a grey screen and can move the pointer but that’s it. On one occasion after using classic and restarting to OS 9 from OS X I got the desktop and things seemed to be running fine. I thought messing around with extensions or rebuilding the desktop might have done something to fix it so restarted from OS 9 -> OS 9 but got stuck before the happy mac icon again.

Other issues:
- The startup disk chooser also locks up after displaying both partitions. I can only get back to OS X by resetting things in Open Firmware again.

Halp, plz What issues would impact OS 9 and the boot drive selector but not OS X or the classic environment?

 

[joshc]

Have you got the Sonnet extension installed for OS 9 and set to run before anything else (put some spaces at the start of the extension file name). I think you also need the Apple CPU extension as well.

I had the exact same problem and it took a bit of messing around with that extension before things would play nicely.

What firmware is your G4 using?

 

[cheesestraws]

Now that's interesting. I have only a couple of suggestions of what I'd do next personally, rather than concrete experience:

• Did you install OS 9 before or after the upgrade? Is it missing a component necessary for newer processors?
• What happens if you try to boot from an 9 CD? Probably that universal eMac 9.2 one that can apparently boot anything...
• Can one reproduce the crash in the disk chooser by poking around in OF?

 

[Gothikon]

Firmware is 4.2.8f1

ill double check the extensions setup tomorrow however, I’m assuming it’s not an extensions issue as it usually fails before the happy Mac. Also, I thought I read in one version of the sonnetencore manual that the1GHz model -7455 I believe -doesn’t require the firmware update or any extensions.

i’ll also give an OS 9 cd a shot too.