Hey all,

I am a little confused to a boot situation I have at the moment. I installed a cheap KVM switch and the G5 became VERY slow to boot. I see the Radeon took a while longer than usual to init. Okay, fine, I can understand if the hardware has to get oriented to a new setup... etc etc.

The machine would then boot occasionally to a black screen and would respond fine to (CMD)+Q then (CMD)+R to reboot and the Radeon showed its usual successful output on my serial debug upon every (failed?) boot.

Booting from OF always gives me good video however. SO! I decided to issue a new boot command in OF for whatever reason and I am now getting an OF error " ultra1:,\\bootinfo.txt, unknown word, HERE= ffa23278

I can "load" the boot.img and "go" and it boots up really fast with solid video every time.

Any clues as to what I goofed up? How do I go about cleaning this up? There is plenty of hope seeing that I have a working system other than having Morph be the default boot system.

TIA for any tips!

G5 2.0 PCIE
SSD
No edits to bootinfo.txt
Blessed it anyway...
sd1: and ultra1: both show the same drive contents of DH0: I am new to OF but that seems odd. Both partitions give the above error...



[ Edited by EVX 23.10.2026 - 19:47 ]

Sounds like your KVM is a little slow on the timing side.

My (unqualified) guess is that the KVM does not deliver proper DDC in time. When side tracking through OF the issue is gone.

There is (was) a way to override DDC and make it static, but I cannot remember how to do that.

You can also try press and hold CTRL while normal booting. This will open a forced resolution and should work, too as no timing and DDC is required.

PS: I assume you mean COMMAND Q and COMMAND R above, to reboot from Ambient blindly.


[ Edited by geit 23.10.2026 - 10:00 ]

Quote:

***********

Correct, Geit! CMD+Q AND CMD+R, my bad.

My assumption was some sort of issue with the new monitor setup caused the Radeon to hunt around for a solution and hit a
(DDC per Geit) timeout... That is how it acted with the random success/fail displaying video upon longer than usual boot times. I think resetting the nvram was all she needed to get back on track.

The machine is back up and running. No magic involved, I just needed to step away for a while... I did check all my other bootinfo.txt files on my machines and they appear to be the same. I will have to learn about all this boot sorcery when I get a chance...

My OF commands on this G5 2.0 PCIe:

reset-nvram
set-defaults
reset-all

After rebooting and knowing that "ultra1" showed my bootinfo.txt :

setenv boot-command boot ultra1:,\\bootinfo.txt
setenv skip-netboot? true
reset-all

She is booting quick and reliable now.

FYI,

-EvX




[ Edited by EVX 23.10.2026 - 10:59 ]