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Ramdisk can't load when I try to manually install. Using Blue and white PowerMac G3. Tower

Open hammish55 opened this issue 1 year ago • 8 comments

When I try to load Ramdisk I get a error message " Failed to load RAMDISK : Invalid device name. " Any suggestions? Excuse my noob question.

hammish55 avatar Jul 24 '24 03:07 hammish55

Is the cd drive showing up in the device list?

Wack0 avatar Jul 24 '24 08:07 Wack0

Not sure how to view the device list. Please explain.

hammish55 avatar Jul 24 '24 09:07 hammish55

I see the Hard drive and the CD drive after

hammish55 avatar Jul 24 '24 13:07 hammish55

Any help to resolve this would me most helpful

hammish55 avatar Jul 25 '24 22:07 hammish55

Does the same error show up every time you try to load the ramdisk? (by which I mean, try to load the ramdisk twice in a row without rebooting)

What optical drive are you using?

Wack0 avatar Jul 25 '24 22:07 Wack0

Yes it does. I let NT run then it says can't find machine type. So from the list I go to OTHER and I press the enter button and it asks again. And repeats asking. I am using the OEM Apple cd-rom drive. I was thinking of swapping out to a more modern dvd-rw drive for testing. Also from the device list I never see the RAMDISK as being loaded.

hammish55 avatar Jul 26 '24 23:07 hammish55

The invalid device name error would be consistent with the IDE/ATAPI driver failing to open the drive (so test unit ready/start unit/read capacity commands failing)... maybe I should look at open firmware's atapi driver to see what it does...

That said, the only Apple OEM optical drive I'm familiar with is the one that came with my Lombard which I had to replace due to it being unable to read parts of discs... it did work otherwise fine inside the ARC firmware though...

Wack0 avatar Jul 27 '24 08:07 Wack0

OK, so when working on the uni-north port I found a slight issue with the ide driver, specifically the atapi side, on every access it sends test unit ready + start/stop unit (start) + read capacity, some drives dislike the repeated start/stop unit. The one in my snow will just spin back down when getting sent that, causing all disc reads to be very slow, I wouldn't be surprised if it causes other issues on other drives.

I will port the fix to grackle arcfw when I get time...

Wack0 avatar Jul 31 '24 08:07 Wack0