Hi there. I've wanted to try out MorphOS for some time and have recently acquired a G4 800Mhz quicksilver powermac. However, I'm having some poor luck.

While I've had luck creating my USB drives and placing the required files, I'm stuck.

I've created a few USB sticks (8gb and 16gb) and found the files in open firmware, but no matter how I try Code: I get the same result:

Code:

And it just sits there never doing anything else.

Here's what I've tried without luck:

- 3.14
- 3.15 (verifying md5)
- boot usb1/disk@1:,\boot.img bm
- 8gb and 16gb thumb drives
- connecting to VGA port
- read through https://library.morph.zone/Open_Firmware#Booting_from_CD and https://morphos-team.net/guide/usb-boot a few times

So that leaves me with three questions:

1. Is booting a quicksilver g4 off USB "supported"?
2. Should I connect the ADC video out (I'm assuming the VGA is the best choice and don't have an ADC connector nearby)
3. Should I just buy CD-R?

Any tips welcome and appreciated!

[ Edited by khawkins98 18.01.2021 - 18:28 ]

Is the graphics card a supported ATI Radeon? Both VGA and ADC connectors should normally work...

Good point on the graphics. I'm fairly certain its an ATI Radeon 7x00 series, but I'll double-check tomorrow.

Appreciate the fast reply.

Seems to be a missing "=" there:
Code:

Don't have a Quicksilver, but I had also troubles on some Macs booting iso-images via USB. Therefore I made 2 partitions on stick 1. HFS for boot.img (device named boot) and 2. a bootable SFS-partition for MOS (device named SYS_USB). Copied content of morphos.iso to that second partition.
It boots (on my Mac) with
Code:
without any problem. For "ud" you have to insert your path.
Notice: Firmware of some Macs will have strange behaviour with Sticks greater than 4GB!



[ Editiert durch Amigaharry2 18.01.2021 - 19:55 ]

The current MorphOS 3.15 hdimg actually is a hybrid image which has both a HFS bootpartition and a MorphOS installation partition, so there should be no need to create a custom USB stick.
It still can be tricky to get it to boot on some Macs, though. Unfortunately, the quality of USB support for various Mac OF versions varies.

I tried installing from USB on a Quicksilver, and it never worked for me. Maybe the USB stick was to big, even if I limited the first (FAT32) partition to 512 MB.

In the end, I installed it from CD...

The particular USB stick you use can make a difference.

The USB stick I used to initially install MorphOS on my MacMini didn't work with my PowerBook. I had to find an older stick and then it worked.

@analogkid:
Yes, it does'nt help to make smaller partitions - the whole stick has to be <4GB, and even that is no guarantee for working. Some sticks are not recognized by OF anyway. But sometimes the following trick helps: USB-support of those OF-versions seems to have a "back-door". These OF-Versions does not create a device-alias at boot-time - you have always to use full path or to save your "own" device-alias to nv-ram (which always points then to the same physical USB-port). If you have a stick (maybe an old 128MB) which is recognized by OF, insert it and turn on Mac to boot into OF-console. Then change the stick to a bigger one (must be in the same slot). Some versions of OF does'nt reciognize the change and accesses now to the new stick.

Quote:
This indicates that it has been able to load the boot.img file from the USB stick... so the stick seems to work for that at least...

Usually when it stucks at that point, you have either provided a wrong filename for the ISO file or graphics card isn't supported.

Radeon 7xxx should be supported, but at some point there were reports that those don't work that well anymore... I don't know if the situation has got better or worse since then.

It catches some people out but you have renamed the iso file to simply morphos.iso haven’t you?

It doesn’t help that it lists that in the installation instructions but it isn’t actually the name of the iso file on the download.

I made that same mistake. this what you should type for MorphOS 3.15:

boot usb1/disk@1:,boot.img bi umsd0:morphos-3.15.iso

Thanks all for the ideas.

I've not been able to get back on the machine as this week has been crazy, but hopefully getting a chance to try again tomorrow.

🤞

Older versions of Morphos (iso) were on a 200MB partition on a USB flash drive. I was not able to install there on PowerMac G4 if the partition was more than 256Mb

Just an update here that I've tried (I believe) most of the suggestions here without much luck. Here's my final attempt with the USB:

Screenshot from OF: ACtC-3d5rWHeXkaKVR__VkmPF8eBQRj9Yg3xtYsRDx44dpRgo_CSezMETvbhnYUieMXkFJmHpl1TLFRPJleHORdcaswthCymxd5WWqAOS2tNnKCmTOlxYq0pWmDlK6QZUYrGHQ-CdrOb8MW1_vUN5kk0MWUSdA=w1318-h899-no

Going off Norbi's comment, I thought perhaps older releases might suit the Quicksilver G4 800 more. But 3.6 and 3.9 had the same behaviour.

At this point I'm guessing my Quicksilver doesn't like the USB method, or there's something perhaps about this 8GB USB stick.

I'll have a dig in the basement for a CDR, maybe I'll get lucky.

Oh, also was able to confirm it's a Radeon 7500 (R200) card.

> it's a Radeon 7500 (R200) card.

Not sure if relevant for the issue, but the Radeon 7500 does not have R200 (which is on Radeon 8500/9100) but RV200, which, despite the number and confusingly enough, does not belong to the R(V)2xx family but to the R(V)1xx family.

Quote:

Ah, sorry, typo on my part. It is RV200.

Quick pic I'm happy I made from them system profiler: [img align='left']https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/plUDytOvVdbONWDOZLFF5ZOcNXZFwIRqvlrbB_FlwSj9yWUjbyFA0tXOI9T14fu_DY_Hwa8I0aWliRqzlcZGMRkNdtDsnsKavWnRyWo-NWe_lGYaYLWtoqAfkZk7WfBZkWsNAhD3z2O8XKUWAXlfbw1vTWB8EUzgLPtIKd1d0-knH4O9SpTapn9uDJcVZKrQwkykcJGj0qN5WtTq23mCJiFQ6RlvlGYxIo9kFRnyjB2rnmEXKyKpUt1WYbGLou0dBgXH9_BameyG514iikj5B82vMApgo7cGk3ktlcdosb0X0za6IEgmi86ySTj5hMQSIFP0_gY6IUdvkDv8ME7KUd3wgBGzYaXBoW1WsjrI8nXMa1tOJwR30iJFEjx3ExeahKb2HjQu6hRb55suO_Tv3mnUHOu6ustTdi6PppBpOQQ9KVPcBZKk7g8OZ73R2HY0d3aRiapUaU6Uu5kISBEJkflR0f0yXdvLcz4xozcBjfQCE9WlU0ZVSfhHNkt-_eWTFGUHKBMKz23gYB-nQ8oD8gD13Ay0kXPVSlG5CyidnAe7San0K4uPEEBoH5nzNBx3kJu-xefSJRI5-is2UrPlSB8MoQJBqKAkVp0kbG2d2V9cR6KkxSow5Qd1yxJBWS4JhIofhEir6lFq5_S6dNF4WKxUmfdgHIiG3xz3LxLH0yaewBTN6qXfVmkFAaYFj78=w1484-h767-no?authuser=0[/img]

Refering to your picture above: Kernel seems to be loaded and started. But then there is no bootable device found and booting stops here. This has nothing to do with OF, because at this time MorphOS has overtaken the complete hardware and is now responsible to find USB-ports.
So I suggest again: Make a bootable SFS-Partition on this stick too, and copy the content of the iso to that stick (except the different boot.img - they are not needed there)! In some cases booting directly from an iso-file won't work! I've seen that issue on different machines and I cannot explain why. Give partition a very high boot-priority, then MOS will find the stick and boot from there, so there is no need to define bootdevice in OF boot-command-line. MOS finds always all bootable devices and boots then from the device with the highest priority.

In the end I gave up and just burned a CD which worked like a charm.

Amigaharry2, appreciate the suggestion but missed it until after I had made the CD. Though I think this advice is worth flagging on the https://morphos-team.net/guide/usb-boot page for some G4 users.

It's been hard to find time to tinker with the little ones in the home office ...

And a thank you to everyone for the input, looking forward to spending some time with MorphOS

[ Edited by khawkins98 29.01.2021 - 10:03 ]