Glad you could join me for another foray into NeXT Land.
What have I been up to for the last few hours?
Well, as previously mentioned, I was having a spot of bother with the RAM and and getting and Exception #2 in the ROM monitor, even though the system was picking up 40MB after tests, but failing with the exception, I thought removing the PRAM (BIOS) battery and leaving it out for a bit may cure the issue once it had reset, usually an hour is enough, but in this case it didn't work.
Well, what to do?
As I said in the last post, It reminded me of an error I had seen before when upgrading the RAM on an accelerator card in one of my Amiga computers. So I decided to open up said Amiga and have a look around. Then like being smacked around the head with a gold bar wrapped in lemon, It hit me, the person whom I bought the accelerator off had sold it me (very cheaply) as not working, and I had spent a number of weeks trying to make it work again, The person I got it from had taken the original SIMMs off it to use in another card, but had found some matching SIMMs to go in it prior to selling it to me.
After a week of frustration and blue air, I finally found what the issue was with it!
The replacement SIMMs had come from an ancient compaq machine, and as you may or may not know, 486 era compaq's used a very specific type of memory which had parity, used a lot in servers and the like for error checking, but not so common in retail end user machines, go compaq!
Anyhow, I replaced the SIMMs in the Amiga card with non parity one's and hey presto, it sprang back into life, and was used up until fairly recently when I donated the machine to a friend.
Could it be as simple as this on the cube?
Well, after poking around in the ROM monitor, I found a command to show the installed memory in blocks of 4, and the type of the memory installed.
Low and behold:
All the new SIMMs are parity page mode, whereas the original 8 are not.
So, I set about the grueling task of now removing ALL the SIMMs, (this is not easy on this board) and separating them into original and new.
I then put back in only the new ones from position 0 - 7
Ok, let's put it all back together and see what happens......
Joygasm! It boots again with 32MB RAM
However, and there's always a but, if I were to present you with the following, what would you do?
And before you say, "Log in" who as? what password?
These are questions that I asked myself, and I tried many combinations to begin with before I kicked myself for not trying the most obvious!
This is a Unix based system right? So the obvious choice to start with should be Root root, everyone used to use that :)
No joy, lol, So I contacted the fellow I got it off and asked him, (my hat goes off to anyone that can remember a password from 10 or so years back!) Sadly it didn't work.
So, what was I to do, I had this sweet machine up and running again with some new tasty RAM but couldn't get into it.
Time for some internets.......
Fortunately the NeXT OS has the same security flaw that OS X does (well up to 10.11 anyway), albeit in a slightly different way, in that you can boot into a special kind of "mode" for want of a better word, that lets you change the password for any user on the system without knowing it first.
On the Mac one could simply boot from a CD or more recently into recovery and simply change said password, And if you remember the older powerPC Macs you could get into open firmware to reset various things there too.
However, NeXT has no open firmware or recovery partition, and booting from a CD when you have no CD drive is a bit difficult.
So I tried a few key commands, wondering if they had too carried over into Mac land, and a bit of Googling, and low and behold, the system can be booted into a Unix shell via ROM monitor :)
So, I set about using a common Unix command to reset the password for the Root account, it goes a little something like this:
- Reboot the system.
- Immediately after the "Testing System" message is replaced with "Loading from disk", hold down the right command key and press the tilde (~) on the numeric keypad. You are now at the ROM monitor.
- Boot the machine into single user mode. Most people boot off the hard disk, and should type the following at the ROM monitor prompt:
Code: NeXT> bsd -s - Once the system has started and dumps you at a root prompt, you need to make sure NetInfo and other services get started. Do this by typing:
Code: sh /etc/rc & - Set the root password using:
Code: passwd root - Now, reboot the system and you can use the new password.
Much grinning ensued, As I was now in the system and free to play.
First run of NeXT Step
Oh my, what and adventure so far :)
But whats that I hear you say, what about the SCSI2SD thingy you mentioned? and the CD-ROM drive? And upgrading from OS 2.4 to 3.3?
Well, first things first, we are almost up to real time now in this adventure, and the CD-ROM drive has presented a bit of a mechanical problem (I dare say electrical/configuration as well later).
The drive fits perfectly in the chassis in the cube, however it does not line up with the slot on the front of the machine :( My intention is to take a lot of measurements and either fabricate or 3D print a cradle for it to sit on that makes it line up properly, I will in due course plug it in without the cradle and test it with a disc in to make sure it works and is configured properly, but that's a thing for another post.
As for the SCSI2SD, well, having used a couple of these already on my Amiga machines, I can honestly say that after a bit of configuration they work superbly.
Here is the SCSI2SD in the cube ready to be fired up.
Conveniently the upgrade is taken care of by the microSD card, which has a full OS 3.3 system pre-loaded with all the extra goodies. (I know, a bit of a cheat, but hey it's been fun so far right) And I will do a manual upgrade soon, and blog it!
Wow, I'm quite tired now, I feel like I have been NeXT Cubing and blogging all day!
Probably because I have.
Ok, back to business, I put the cube back together and fired it up, Needless to say it all worked first time, which really surprised me! So i'll leave you with this little gem, that pretty much sums the whole experience up so far.........
Notice how quiet it is now without the Winchester drive!
That's it for now folks, we are at real time.
Coming up
I intend to try and get the cube on the network, and hopefully browse a website, maybe the first ever one? And perhaps try and send an email.
And hopefully by then I will have sorted the CD-ROM out
Thanks for reading, and hope to blog you again soon.
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