Half-dead G4

[Marcel Moolenaar]

On Jan 2, 2008, at 9:39 AM, jrh29 at alumni.cwru.edu wrote:

> Related, I tried some boot experiments, and it does appear to boot, or
> at least attempt to boot, an OS, since with no drive installed when I
> hit the power button it powers off immediately, but with a bootable  
> disk
> hooked up (CD or hard drive) it gets to the point where I need to hold
> it in for 5+ seconds before it powers off.  This leads me to believe
> that perhaps it's switched into some sort of "Apple-only" mode, or OFW
> thinks the console exists somewhere else (serial?) in which case I'm
> probably boned unless I can find information on setting up a serial
> console for a G4, which so far I haven't.

Serial consoles work out if the box. That is, when you set the console
to be serial in OFW, FreeBSD uses that. This is known to work on a
Xserve G4. However, you do need a machine with an actual serial port,
not a built-in modem.

-- 
Marcel Moolenaar
xcllnt at mac.com