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

Gothikon

New member
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?
 
Last edited:

joshc

Well-known member
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

Well-known member
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

New member
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.
 
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