>Actually, I run several differently configured systems on multiple drives
>and partitions. "Extensions off" also failed with all OS 8.6 bootup
>attempts, also from different partitions. These would change the load order
>and ram usage considerably so your theory is as good/bad/facile as mine ;).
>There were also several others who suddenly had OS 8.6 upgrade problems on
>desktops on another digest, but too few to draw conclusions--hence I
>speculate. I also keep a "clean" installed system without 3rd party
>extensions on a separate partition to reference all trials.
Actually, different extensions sets won't change anything if it's part of
the OS itself that's loading into a suspect word of memory (generally
something in the system file, though some of those "extensions" are pretty
darn core these days).
Shift-booting changes a lot less than you might think, too; it again
doesn't affect the OS proper (which is ill-defined these days, but you can
be sure it's getting pretty big if of nothing else), and also doesn't
affect a lot of things in the Extensions folder. This is more or less of
necessity; it's not all that easy to bootstrap a machine, particularly one
this complicated (a lot of dead code still gets loaded too for this reason,
especially drivers for hardware native to other Mac models). And I still
can't see a more likely explanation for the symptom sequence you
experienced.
There are always a whole stream of people with major problems every time an
OS upgrade appears, and Macintouch et al always rave on about how this time
it's system death incarnate (about as useful as the rest of the media,
unfortunately). A couple of months later, everyone's running it. Personally
I've never had any special problem with *any* OS revision since 7.0.
Anything that does appear can be tracked down (like the Energy Saver vs.
Duo modem thing). I suspect there are just always a few people with disk
directories in a shaky state, and any major wind could knock down that
house of cards, including that of an OS upgrade. This is not to say that
Apple can't make mistakes - they can and do - but that those mistakes are
very unlikely to be of a catastrophic nature, and especially that *nothing*
is of the global catastrophic nature frequently described, simply because
computers aren't really the black boxes that they appear to be. Each
potential problem happens at a particular layer. I suppose the source of my
rant is largely that I'm just hoping to see that notion instilled in the
lurking audience, as much as anything specific to this case.
>Absurd it may be, but, as you can see, I'm speculating openly and inviting
>opinions/explanations to better understand the problem. The fact is the
>problem hard drive would boot both a G3-3400 directly and a G3-300 tower (in
>SCSI mode) but not the 2400 (either directly installed or in SCSI mode).
>That is absurd and defies logic. Apple recommends clean installs whenever
>possible, and with OS 8.6 updater this is not possible. Any good
>ideas/explanations why a directory will boot on certain computers and not
>others?
The three architectures will load different driver sets, and possibly even
different non-driver code segments that are peers to the same user function
in some cases, so it's not as unlikely as it first appears. I regret that I
don't recall from your initial description how far the 2400 got in that
boot sequence, but it probably either died at the start (disk driver
partially corrupted but still works on the G3's, not very likely but not
unheard of) or the early middle (loading device drivers, more likely).
Beyond that, the main point is that interaction with a disk directory is
done by *software* reading data structures written by other software, so
any contribution of the 2400 vs. some other Mac is going to be indirect at
best. This differs from driver performance, for instance, where there's a
more direct path to the hardware (but generally still not completely so
under the Mac OS).
Apple recommends those things that make technical support easiest or even
possible for them, and that's the best global policy they could have (which
doesn't make it the best local policy for everyone). My own install policy
(that which has led to so few problems in the last decade :) is generally
to install somewhere else and drag over those things that I know to be
important, but the main point (which clean installs address only by
default) is to groom the System Folder afterward and look for installer
mistakes and especially leftover cruft. And the other main point is just to
make sure the disk is free of directory damage, reasonably unfragmented,
and with an up-to-date driver.
--
Marc Sira | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"If you can't play with words, what good are they?"
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