IIGS Won't Boot To GS/OS?

[EvieSigma]

I just recently acquired a complete IIGS system (well, with a Mac keyboard/mouse and an Applied Engineering 5.25 floppy drive) and I managed to make a GS/OS disk and a game disk for testing but I just cannot actually get the system to boot into GS/OS. Trying to boot off the GS/OS crashes every single time with an 0308 fatal error (the explanation of which I found makes zero sense to me) and the game disk (which seems to be a booter) tries to boot but instead gets kicked to the monitor instead. Are my disks somehow bad or could the problem be with the IIGS itself?

I'm trying to boot GS/OS 5.0.4, which should run given I have a fully populated 1MB RAM card.

 

[Dog Cow]

Trying to boot off the GS/OS crashes every single time with an 0308 fatal error (the explanation of which I found makes zero sense to me)

What do you see on the screen right before the crash? Try booting the disk with the space bar held down. You should get a text screen that shows each component of GS/OS being loaded.

 

[EvieSigma]

I just get a bunch of gibberish...

The GS/OS disk freezes on this:

And the Arkanoid disk freezes here before kicking to the monitor:

 

[bibilit]

Not an Apple II guy, but looks like you have a Ram trouble here.
 

 

[Gorgonops]

I had some bad RAM on my IIgs' original memory card so it's certainly not an impossibility that's your problem. (The system would work fine running Apple II software but it likewise crashed trying to boot, netboot in this case, into GS/OS.) I suggest running the diagnostic program built into ROM, I believe it presents sufficient information to localize the bad chip.(*) The card takes standard 41256 DRAMs which are still relatively easy to find.

(* note: I never bothered replacing the bad chip on my card because I had a second IIgs with a bad motherboard handy; its RAM card was okay.)

 

[cruff]

Have you tried booting the diagnostic disk?  There is a RAM test on it.

 

[EvieSigma]

I tried running the self test built into ROM and it says System Good at the end...

 

[Gorgonops]

You know, Googling around I think I may well be mis-remembering and the built-in diagnostic only tests the onboard RAM; you might need to generate a disk with a RAM test program on it to diagnose memory on the cards. The reason I'm thinking I might have been able to localize the error may have been that when the GS/OS 6.x netboot bombed out I didn't get a screen full of garbage, it spit out an exception that had an address in it.

Here's one if you can decompress shrinkit archives.

http://mmt.gwlink.net/

 

[EvieSigma]

I have CiderPress which is supposed to be able to handle that.

But I'm really starting to think I should order one of those 4MB GGLabs cards sooner rather than later.