alen@crash.cts.com (Alen Shapiro) (08/14/90)
A friend of mine was having trouble with his macII and asked me
for assistance. It seems his system (A MacII with an 84Mb internal
CMS - partitioned using SilverLining 5.12, 5Mb RAM and lots of inits)
had suddenly started trying to boot from his backup system partition
(called apple-ications - guess what he stores there!!).
Turns out that there was something wrong with this set of system software
which caused a crash back out to MacsBugs. He knew it was attempting to
boot from this other partition since that was the only other system-blessed
partition and the only one that had MacsBugs.
He asked me a simple question - "How do I get it to boot from "main" (his
official system partition)".
We tried "startup device" but it made no difference, we tried moving the
system out of his system folder on apple-ications - that caused the
welcome to mac message to flash (extremely fast) on next boot. We tried
removing the system folder completely from apple-ications, that caused
a boot from main but only AFTER 2 happy macs appeared (one after the other)
as the system still tried to go after the apple-ications volume.
In disgust, I completely reformatted his volumes, reloaded the "main"
partition (alone) and a reboot had it booting from main with only one
happy mac. Restoring his apple-ications volume and deleting the
system folder had us back to the 2-happy-mac-state.
I twigged that it may have something to do with alphabetic volume ordering,
put a space char BEFORE main (tricky - type a<SPACE>main, then delete the first
"a") and it now boots from "main" with only one happy mac.
OK, I've fixed it but I still don't understand what is going on here. I zapped
the PRAM using the control-panel option+control+shift trick, no change when
I took the leading space off "main". Why did the system change its mind
and try to go alphabetic? How does software like Jasmine's specify the
boot volume for a single drive? Boot-block editing (as provided by fedit_plus)
did not provide any clues.
Enquiring minds want to know...
ps my friend was originally on 6.0.4 and is now on 6.0.5.
--alen the Lisa Slayer (trying to turn a SPARC into a flame)
alen%shappy.uucp@crash.cts.com (a mac+ uucp host - what a concept!!)
alen@crash.cts.comowen@raven.phys.washington.edu (Russell Owen) (08/14/90)
If a hard drive is partitioned with SilverLining (v. 5.x), and more than one partition is bootable, the first (alphabetically) partition is indeed the one used to boot. I don't know why Startup Device can't override this, but it can't. If you select a partition with Startup Device then run Startup Device again (may have to reboot first) you'll find that ALL the bootable partitions of that drive are selected. Anybody know if this a problem in SilverLining, or is Startup Device bad at handling multiple partitions? Anyway, the alphabetization feature can be handy. I keep a "pure" system (no INITs, no modifications) on one partition and my regular system on another. To test for INIT-caused problems, I simply rename one of the partitions and reboot to get the "pure" system. Russell Owen owen@raven.phys.washington.edu Astronomy Dept. FM-20 University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195