To the point, is there a way to do this without a boot floppy or HD, or is my best bet just using a 7.5 network boot floppy?

Is there a way to modify the ROM, or make my floppy controller read a kind of solid state memory (7.5 boot floppy on compact flash made with my iMac)

~^^archie

Just a thought...

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"I keep my friends close, but I keep my enemies closer" - Unkown

I would love to do that with a mac SE I have, 3 classics and a classic II that I'm getting. who knows, maybe it'll all work magnificently and I'll have a 5 client network... now, I just need to get more Phonnet adaptors or some ethernet equipment...

quote:

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if you could hack some sort of non-volatile solid state storage onto either the SCSI, IDE, or floppy interface, you COULD set up a VERY minimal system folder on it, and then set it to reboot off the server, with a bit of trickery i guess.

Just a thought...

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jt ™.
Trash Hauler: call sign: eight-ball
C.O. AC-130H SpecOps 68kMLAAF

also, does Apple+OPTION+X+O on a classic have network access? can I copy that system to a floppy?

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One wonders... can One load the "kernel" of an OS, from the solid state scsi memory previously mentioned, then load the rest of the Mac OS from the server, in this case a Mac IIsi . . .

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you might just be in luck:

From the Macintosh IIsi Developers Notes:

quote:

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Network booting

The Macintosh IIsi computer is designed to provide future support
for network booting (for example, starting up from a file server
rather than an internal disk drive). You can use the Control Panel to
set a flag in the ADB microcontroller that causes the system to start
up over a communications network such as Ethernet or LocalTalk ® .
This feature is particularly useful in classroom situations where
everyone has to start up from the same system image.

Programmable wakeup

The ADB microprocessor includes a function that allows setting of a
wakeup time, causing the Macintosh IIsi computer to automatically
power up at a specified time and perform an operation. These
wakeup flags are contained in the code of the ADB microcontroller
and are controlled by software.

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I just figured out how to open all the .PDF's I've been having trouble with (FINALLY!!!! ) and ran across these tidbits. I wonder if the SE/30 could do the same thing with transplanted ROM's and the ADB controller from a IIsi? Dunno if it'll work for a variant of 'NIX, but it's a place to start hacking!

jt ™.
Trash Hauler: call sign: eight-ball
C.O. AC-130H SpecOps 68kMLAAF

p.s. this isn't my thing ('NIX-n-Networking) but i just had a thought: if you can't load 'NIX using the NetBoot feature, could you have the IIsi NetBoot into the Mac OS and then autostart a Applescript setting up and loading a RAM Disk with what you need for a bootable'NIX volume, set it as the Boot Disk, and then restarting into 'NIX (or doing a hotkey reset if Restart still won't boot into 'NIX) Once booted in your O.S. of choice you could then do whatever you need to to get things set up the way you want them if you want to free up the RAM Disk or whatever?

Edited by - Trash80toG-4 on 31 Aug 2002 11:43:31

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"I keep my friends close, but I keep my enemies closer" - Unkown

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Thats interesting stuff jt, and will make me an even more likely candidate for IIsi ownership. However, how DO you "reset the ADB microcontroller"? I've used IIsis before, and I haven't seen anything like it. Maybe it was a feature in prototype IIsis that was removed on the real thing?

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I'll wager it's in all of them and that the way to tell the microcontroller what to do is by communicating with it over the I2C bus, Apple is not likely to have changed the ROM or the ADB microcontroller during production if it is mentioned in the developer's notes, search for a tech note when Apple's servers come back up after the weekend. I'd probably check all the dev notes on networking from the IIsi era at the same time.

Somebody on fritter just posted info to the effect that their CC will boot from ROM when no other boot volume is available, but it could have been a mis-statement. I'd check the CC dev notes against the IIsi's to see if it is based on the si's architecture.

If I owned either machine and it happened to be networked, I'd try cold-starting it without any boot volumes available just to see what happened! I have a sneaking suspicion that the ADB microcontroller might be reset automagically under certain conditions!

jt ™.
Trash Hauler: call sign: eight-ball
C.O. AC-130H SpecOps 68kMLAAF

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"I keep my friends close, but I keep my enemies closer" - Unkown

quote:

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oooh! The geek inside me is excited!

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NFG! It was an error! They got their CC mixed up with their Classic, bleh! Whatever, if I had a IIsi, I'd still try booting it networked, with no drives attached to see what happened!

jt ™.
Trash Hauler: call sign: eight-ball
C.O. AC-130H SpecOps 68kMLAAF

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"I keep my friends close, but I keep my enemies closer" - Unkown

quote:

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Right. I've just checked the KBase archives. Nothing there. Now to check the devnotes...

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jt ™.
Trash Hauler: call sign: eight-ball
C.O. AC-130H SpecOps 68kMLAAF

THnx
"gooey on the outside, explosive on the inside!"

quote:

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I was just thinking...
if you connected the IIsi directly to a DSL modem, and this phantom control panel can boot over TCP/IP... can we say world wide boot server?!

THnx
"gooey on the outside, explosive on the inside!"

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Warrior maclover5
68k Macintosh Liberation Army
Number of 68ks Liberated: 6

the LCII is really the netboot computer that I can imagine using, it's slim, light and quiet, without the HDD, and floppy drive, hmm, lets fill in the floppy hole, and cut off that stupid foot, then lets add some way to prop it up vertically, and use a larger monitor rather than the 12", in fact, lets scoot up the mobo and build in the Applevision monitor adaptor, a powercord extender and ethernet extention, and there's only 3 ports, power, network and system i.o

i have a friend who is saying that apple says anything older than an iMac can't netboot at all, but this is "network booting"

anyhow, at that point, we have almost a "thin client" this is common in the windows world these days, having thin clients that have ARM processors (like inthe newton) and run windows CE

I'll be looking far into the theories of network booting with any platform soon though!

quote:

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I'll be looking far into the theories of network booting with any platform soon though!

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"I keep my friends close, but I keep my enemies closer" - Unkown

quote:

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I was just reading that NetBoot pdf that jt linked us in the previous post, and i noticed that on NewWorld based Macs, BootP is used to initiate a connection with the server, and then TTFP is used to transfer system files to RAM. Would this info be of any use to someone wishing to write such a control panel that allows netbooting?

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Go check the fritter thread for a procedure Eudi posted to test if the IIsi is set up to look for a server on the network.

jt ™.
Trash Hauler: call sign: eight-ball
C.O. AC-130H SpecOps 68kMLAAF

Some things don't make sense to me...

if NeXT invented the idea of network booting, WHY was it possible on Macintoshes of the same era, a time when Apple didn't eve know that NeXT existed...

Are NetBoot, as we know it with OSX server and the one mentioned here different? I say it is because, of several things, but he seems to think that it's all just like the current netboot...

YAHH... RiiGHT.....

I'll get the list of things he "knows" are wrong with the concepts of this network booting :P....

then I'll post them here :)

BSD is something that I would run on a server, not a workstation, if I were netbooting for a client, it would not be BSD...

By the time your boot disk is working, you have a full operational Mac OS on it, you have the bootloader, and more than one Operating system kernel (the mac OS has a kernel too you know), AND this boot disk either has to support some serious applescript, that makes it a 7.5 boot disk by the way... OR, it becomes a chooser, and finding the server and entering names and passwords affair, and THEN there's the issue of keeping the network disk connected while BSD reboots the machine.

This is not in any way what is envisioned as a "network computer" no, a network computer is something that you simply turn on, and it either has a small HDD from which it starts up, or it just finds the server and boots, or lets you pick the image from which to boot (via menus either driven by the server, or in the rom)

quote:

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if NeXT invented the idea of network booting, WHY was it possible on Macintoshes of the same era, a time when Apple didn't eve know that NeXT existed...

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Official 68kMLA Music and NeXT Expert
OpenStep Page at http://openstep.topcities.com/
Macs Liberated: SE (2), LC, IIsi, PB 145b, Quadra 700, 6100 (2), PB 5300, PowerMac 5400/200, Performa 6400/180
PCs liberated from Windoze: 3

my friend who said about the NeXT also said similar things, he stated that this concept with the LCII and si are, in fact, netboot... i don't see how that's legally possible though...

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