I've owned this PM 6500/300 for almost a year and I've had an intermittent boot issue where the Mac hangs on start up. Well now it's become chronic. I have a BluSCSI v2 with multiple drives, all bootable (up until now) as well as an SD to IDE adapter with two partitions for starting up on IDE. It usually works but now it won't. I have a 1.1 PCI USB card as well as a PCI ethernet card. I do boot from Mac OS 9.22 even though the highest OS it can officially support is 9.1.
Anyway, to give a short list of symptoms, when booting (cold or warm) the boot drive has to be fixed (repaired) because it didn't shutdown properly. Next, I log into my SAN from the 6500 and give the Finder access to Keychain. After that it stops with the boot drive icon in the upper right corner and an infinite watch dial pointer that can be moved around but I can't do anything else. Oh, I forgot to mention that holding the 'C' key down while booting doesn't boot from the restore CD. Also, when the 6500 hangs nothing can turn off power. I have to pull the power cable. If I then plug it back in, the 6500 immediately reboots and starts up on it's own. That last symptom changes if I pull out the MotherBoard and hit its reset button. Then it isn't hung anymore and starts up when I hit the KB power button. This appears to be scrambled NVRAM? But how do I clear the NVRAM? Is there a key combo like on the SE/30 or LC475?
Without it fully booting, I can't change the startup disk in the control panel as I have been trying move to a different boot drive. Today, I found this list in the 6500 User's Manual (I've included a picture) of all the special key combos and what they do. So, my question is, is there a keyboard key combo, like the G5 iMac (hold down option on startup) that will give a list of bootable drives at startup so I can control where this PM 6500 can start from? I've tried the Command-Option-Shift-Delete key combo but it really doesn't do anything. When I search online for this information, this is what I get:
------------------------
Turn on your Mac and continue to press and hold the power button as your Mac starts up. Release the power button when you see the startup options screen, which shows your startup disks and a gear icon labeled Options.
------------------------
Well, that doesn't happen on my PM 6500 so I have no idea what they're talking about. Here's what I'm plan to do once I can control my startup disk and reset the NVRAM, I want to do installation of OS 8.6 and 9.1 to see if this fixes this issue. I've got 9.2.2 which works great. I have plenty of micro-SD cards to boot from and test the system. The 9.2.2 System folder I got was from OldWorldSupport 1.0.1 and has been working great. So I'm not sure what happened. I'm using 9.2.2 because Keychain in older versions of the OS seem very unstable on my 6500 but works fine for me.
So I appreciate any suggestions, ideas or previous experience to help find the most stable version of OS and hardware as I'm still trying to figure out how to make a 6500, LC475, a G5 iMac and an SE/30 to share files over a TCP/IP network.
Thank you for your time,
Gerry
Anyway, to give a short list of symptoms, when booting (cold or warm) the boot drive has to be fixed (repaired) because it didn't shutdown properly. Next, I log into my SAN from the 6500 and give the Finder access to Keychain. After that it stops with the boot drive icon in the upper right corner and an infinite watch dial pointer that can be moved around but I can't do anything else. Oh, I forgot to mention that holding the 'C' key down while booting doesn't boot from the restore CD. Also, when the 6500 hangs nothing can turn off power. I have to pull the power cable. If I then plug it back in, the 6500 immediately reboots and starts up on it's own. That last symptom changes if I pull out the MotherBoard and hit its reset button. Then it isn't hung anymore and starts up when I hit the KB power button. This appears to be scrambled NVRAM? But how do I clear the NVRAM? Is there a key combo like on the SE/30 or LC475?
Without it fully booting, I can't change the startup disk in the control panel as I have been trying move to a different boot drive. Today, I found this list in the 6500 User's Manual (I've included a picture) of all the special key combos and what they do. So, my question is, is there a keyboard key combo, like the G5 iMac (hold down option on startup) that will give a list of bootable drives at startup so I can control where this PM 6500 can start from? I've tried the Command-Option-Shift-Delete key combo but it really doesn't do anything. When I search online for this information, this is what I get:
------------------------
Turn on your Mac and continue to press and hold the power button as your Mac starts up. Release the power button when you see the startup options screen, which shows your startup disks and a gear icon labeled Options.
------------------------
Well, that doesn't happen on my PM 6500 so I have no idea what they're talking about. Here's what I'm plan to do once I can control my startup disk and reset the NVRAM, I want to do installation of OS 8.6 and 9.1 to see if this fixes this issue. I've got 9.2.2 which works great. I have plenty of micro-SD cards to boot from and test the system. The 9.2.2 System folder I got was from OldWorldSupport 1.0.1 and has been working great. So I'm not sure what happened. I'm using 9.2.2 because Keychain in older versions of the OS seem very unstable on my 6500 but works fine for me.
So I appreciate any suggestions, ideas or previous experience to help find the most stable version of OS and hardware as I'm still trying to figure out how to make a 6500, LC475, a G5 iMac and an SE/30 to share files over a TCP/IP network.
Thank you for your time,
Gerry
