On Sat, 2006-05-08 at 20:44 -0400, AlbaClause wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-05-08 at 17:51 -0400, Jeffrey Loren Shaw wrote:
> 
> > ...any ideas about how I can consistantly boot into NetBSD? At this point, 
> > I'd be happy with even a 1 in 2 success rate. Oh and one more potentially 
> > interesting fact - macos is unable to shut down or reboot my 840av. It's 
> > very bizarre. 100% of the time, if I want to reboot, I have to use 
> > apple-control-power. If I want to shut down, I have to pull the power cord. 
> > On the other hand, under NetBSd, shutdown -h now worked perfectly. 
> 
> 
> If you can't shutdown your Mac from within Mac OS, I'd tend to think
> that you're not dealing with a NetBSD install issue.  Do you have any
> other third-party hardware installed in your 840AV that could be causing
> problems?   Also, you might want to try swapping your RAM, checking to
> make sure that everything is seated correctly, and maybe even try
> swapping out your ROM SIMM.
> 
> Which version of Mac OS are you using?  Have you tried zapping the PRAM?
> 
> This is what I would do if I were in your particular situation:
> 
> - Zap the PRAM
> - Reboot from a Mac OS CD-ROM
> - Format drive.
> - Reinstall Mac OS (something between 7.5 and 8.0)
> - Reinstall NetBSD using the sysinst utility.
> 
> If that failed, I would do the following:
> 
> - Swap RAM SIMMs for known good SIMMs
> - Swap ROM SIMM for known good SIMM
> - Zap the PRAM
> - Reboot from a Mac OS CD-ROM
> - Format drive
> - Reinstall Mac OS (Something between 7.5 and 8.0)
> - Reinstall NetBSD using the sysinst utility.
> 
> If that failed, I would swap the hard drive, and do procedure #1 all
> over again.  Only, I would use the traditional install method the second
> time around, and install from an Appletalk mounted partition.

Oops, I see that you have tried zapping your PRAM.  My guess is that your problem is either being caused by the SCSI card, ROM SIMM, or RAM SIMMs.  Try using the Mac's builtin SCSI bus.