Extension loading order

[themagichoof]

The extensions and drivers in OS8/OS9 load in alphabetical order usually but sometimes not. I don't know what programmers do to force drivers to load in 1st place when starting up your Mac - and I'm talking besides renaming the extensions, but a tip I received is that perhaps there's a non-printable character inserted into the resource fork of the culprit driver by the original programmers.

Renaming the driver with Zs and ~ signs won't push the culprit driver to the back of the line, and neither will dropping it into the System folder which is checked after the Extensions folder. There must be something elsewhere that's causing this. I briefly looked over the culprit driver in ResEdit but I couldn't find the area that the driver name is in to check for non-printable characters. I'm not a programmer at all so that may not even be the problem, it's just a guess.

http://www57.zippyshare.com/v/2970575/file.html

The culprit driver is the PCI-324 driver. The other extension in there is the one I need to get to load BEFORE the PCI-324 driver. Sonnet first, then PCI-324 is the ticket. With the current order of PCI-324 1st then Sonnet 2nd, the system crashes. Another idea it to meddle with the Sonnet driver and force it to load 1st instead of meddling with the PCI-324 driver, but whichever way is easier is fine by me.

 

[catzilla]

IIRC there was a way to force an extension to load 1st by starting the name with a "." or space. It's been a few years since I messed with extensions. The only OS9 machine I have been using recently is the PB G3 Kanga and it doesn't need any startup vodoo.

 

[themagichoof]

I tried all of the renaming wizardry I possibly could to no avail. There's some weird voodoo going on with the driver, something else besides filenames that's making it load first. Just can't figure out what...

 

[robertdsc]

Doesn't Conflict Catcher enable custom loading of extensions? I seem to remember that doing so years ago.