Splash Screen Changed? What the heck?

[SC68Cal]

Hey, I did a NV-Ram reset from open firmware, and upon restart, my TiBook shows the splash screen from OS9 with the happy mac icon, as opposed to the large Apple logo that OSX comes with.

What the heck?

It's kind of neat, but I liked the Apple logo splash screen better. Where did it go? There was no OS9 installed on the computer.

 

[clayj]

So... you used someone else's (i.e., not Apple's) firmware to update your Mac, and now you're surprised that the boot screen has changed? Sounds to me like the boot screen is stored in the firmware, and the firmware you loaded includes an OS 9-style boot screen.

 

[jsw]

clayj: I think "open firmware" = "single user mode".

Edit: I know what I meant... but not single user mode. But it's similar... a low-level console view.

 

[SC68Cal]

The firmware was not updated in any way. I booted into single-user and used the Reset NV-Ram and Reset-All commands and then rebooted, I was playing with my batteries in hopes to eek out a little bit more time while my Recharger/Reconditioner is on the way.

If anything, when I reformatted the TiBook months ago and installed just OS X the splash-screen must have been stored in a voliatle memory location, and resetting the NVRAM brought up the classic splash screen that is probably stored in a non-volitale location. Since resetting the NVRAM probably got rid of the setting to display the OSX splash screen, I guess the computer goes back and grabs the classic one that is probably stored as deep in the memory as the boot sound is

 

[cait-sith]

Uh.. he didn't install other firmware -- he just did a reset of his system's non-volatile memory.

And, that's the default boot screen for that laptop. How to get the OSX apple back, I dunno.. reinstall OSX? That happened to me on a G4 tower, I never did bother fixing it.

And that's not single-user mode, it is the firmware console. The hardware has it's own interface separate of an operating system. It has nothing to do with the OS.

 

[SC68Cal]

Ok, I'm going to get a consensus on what "Single-user mode" is and compare it to Open Firmware mode, because it seems like both of these terms are used interchangably.

Wikipedia : Open Firmware

Open Firmware (also, OpenBoot) is a hardware-independent firmware (computer software which loads the operating system), developed by Sun Microsystems, and used in post-NuBus PowerPC-based Apple Macintosh computers, Sun Microsystems SPARC based workstations and servers, IBM POWER systems, and PegasosPPC systems, among others. On those computers, Open Firmware fulfills the same tasks as BIOS does on PC computers.

From Apple Support:

If you want to troubleshoot the startup sequence of your computer using Unix commands, you can start up your computer in single-user mode. You should do this only if you are comfortable with Unix and are confident that you know what you are doing.

I booted into single-user mode and it seems to have some similar properties as the Terminal. I believe that single-user mode uses some sort of shell (that I can't identify, Open Firmware uses a Forth-based shell to interact with the machine's hardware.

I'm going to read a bit more into this, but I believe that both of these are entirely different, and we are more likely to interact with the Open Firmware than single-user mode.

 

[savar]

I'm going to read a bit more into this, but I believe that both of these are entirely different, and we are more likely to interact with the Open Firmware than single-user mode.

You're right, they ARE totally different. When you boot into single user mode, you're running some kind of unix shell (probably csh or bash)...this shell is a process running under an Operating System (Darwin), so it has access to all the features of the OS (memory management, file system, networking...), can run all of your programs (so long as they're not graphical), etc.

OF Mode is not really what I would call a shell -- althought some would. Shell implies a program that wraps some core, or kernel, program, to isolate the user from the inner details of the operating system. OF has no underlying OS. It is simply a FORTH interpreter which is programmed into some chip on the motherboard and it has access to some stored values which are only very occasionally worth accessing (such as what device to boot from, what address in memory the display buffer starts at, etc.). Most of these things can be accessed from a user-space program running in an OS anyway, so the OF interface is really there just for emergency cases, like if you screw up some setting and the OS will no long boot. Remember, OF is a lot like BIOS on PCs.

I'm not sure if the OP was talking about a unix shell or OF, but yes they are two totally separate animals, hardly even comparable.

 

[SC68Cal]

I had a gut feeling that under single user mode Darwin had been loaded, but there was no "Welcome to Darwin" MOTD or anything to confirm my suspicions.

 

[mkrishnan]

I had a gut feeling that under single user mode Darwin had been loaded, but there was no "Welcome to Darwin" MOTD or anything to confirm my suspicions.

I guess it's possible that this was changed by some update and then un-changed, but that seems awful strange....

There's actually one more command. You might try going back to OF one more time and doing these *three* commands in order:

reset-nvram
reset-defaults
reset-all

I've done this on an iBook G4, but that's way too new to have the OS 9 boot splash in its firmware...so I'm not 100% sure why what happened, happened.