Hey all,

First post, and I dunno what else to do with this damn pismo. I got it with no HD/optical drive. So I got a 2nd hand toshiba 15 gig drive that the previous owner had installed X on. I dropped the drive into the pismo and it booted up fine. I don't want to run X right now and I don't have a licence for it either.

So I hooked it up to my upgraded 7500 as a FW target disk (via PCI interface) and initialized the pismo's HD. I then used the 7500's CD drive to install 9.1 and two updaters downloaded from Apple. All the files showed up, so I unmounted the pismo (disk to trash) and rebooted it by itself. No nice "welcome to Macintosh os", just a folder with a blinking question mark. Hmm. No system? So I remounted it in target disk mode, and there was a lovely system folder there.

Dunno quite what to think. Would a dead PRAM battery cause this kind of errant behavior?

Looking fwd to anyone's thoughts. . .

r.

The system folder may need to be "blessed". Start up from your 7500 in firewire disk mode. The system folder on your Pismo should have a Mac smiley face on it if the system is "blessed". If there is no Mac smiley face on the folder then try this:

1) Open the system folder
2) Open the folder called system
3) Close the folders
4) Check to see if the smiley face is now on the main system folder.

If the smiley face shows up then go to the startup disk control panel and see if you can select the Pismo drive as the startup disk. Select the Pismo drive if possible. Shutdown and disconnect the 7500 and then try to start up the Pismo only.

If none of the above works then you might try zapping the pram (option-apple-P-R keys held down during startup, wait for three bongs before you let go)

Another possible problem could be the options you selected during the OS9 install. When you are using the 7500 as your boot computer using firewire disk mode, thats the machine that the OS9 installer thinks it is installing too. The 7500 sees the Pismo as just another hard drive hooked up to it. Make sure you selected the options to install to "All" versions of Macintosh. If you selected to install only the options for a specific machine, the OS installer thinks you only want the options for a 7500. It may not have installed some key files that are vital to a Pismo, that is a very different and newer computer.

Thanks for the thoughts. Checked again:

1. The system on the Pismo HD is blessed.

2. PRAM is zapped.

3. I installed all versions.

What I did find interesting is that I booted into the open firmware dialogue and tried to force the machine to boot the new world ROM file. The pismo said that it couldn't find it,(BING! source of problem!) so I opened up the pismo's system suitcase in resedit and I couldn't find it either. Which sorta leads me to believe that it wasn't installed, presumably due to the fact that I was running the installation from an old world machine. Sigh. I guess I gotta track down an optical drive now.

Thanks again for the input.

r.