Comments on: open firmware’s default catch

By: John M Tulsa

John M Tulsa — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 14:36:25 +0000

Hoo Ray. Never seen this before DEFAULT CATCH! and hub errorff939xxxxetc.

I thought the Blue G4 (running 9.1) was headed to the recycle dumpster after too many years for faithful service. Pulled the battery and pushed the silver button just north of the positive terminal (never knew it was there until reading Raymond above) and bam, desktop. I think I will back up now. thanks Raymond and thread. I did not reinstall system or partition a disk. I just pulled the battery and pushed the button.

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 23:05:25 +0000

Huge help in an emergency! Pulled the battery and held the button and it worked like a charm. Got that big beautiful gray apple up on an old B&W 450 G3. Thanks for the info.

By: Devon

Devon — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 19:08:35 +0000

yo paul … devon from the animators here … trying to fix our studio machine and came across your site! go figure. you’ve got the most popular default catch in town.

hope to see you soon …

By: Raymond

Raymond — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 18:43:47 +0000

I had the same problem, but not related to an update. I opened the machine and held down that little button by the battery…I can’t remember what it’s called, but it’s an acronym. I held that little sucker down for a good ten seconds, and low and behold, what to my wondering eyes did appear, but an O-S-X and a gernally wonderful overall startup experience.

By: corey Osman

corey Osman — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 23:26:29 +0000

Was trying to install OS X 10.4 tiger on my 15″ flat panel imac and was getting these same errors. I then tried the above suggestion and it solved the problem. Thanks.

By: Dave Emmons

Dave Emmons — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 12:01:34 +0000

I had this same issue creep up on me with an iMac G4 15-inch LCD flat screen. The fix as described above worked perfectly. God bless Google and the Internet!

The search I used is: http://www.google.com/search?q=open+firmware+prompt+after+hard+drive+upgrade+imac&start=0

–
d a v e

By: Helmking

Helmking — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 19:07:53 +0000

Macintosh starts up to Open Firmware or gray screen after upgrading hard drive
If you upgrade your Macintosh computer from its original hard drive to a new hard drive that is larger than 8 GB, you may see some odd symptoms, such as one of these:

When the computer starts up, it displays a gray screen. The desktop never appears.

When the computer starts up, it shows a white screen, with text that includes the phrases, “Open Firmware” and “default catch”.

When the computer starts up, you may see an alert message such as “unimplemented trap” or “segment loader error”.

When you try to install Mac OS X on the computer, the hard disk is dim and can’t be selected in the installer.

This only happens with certain Macintosh computers that originally had a hard drive smaller than 8 GB, and that have now been upgraded with a hard drive larger than 8 GB. These computers include:
iMac 233 MHz

iMac 266 MHz

iMac 333 MHz

Power Macintosh G3 Desktop

Power Macintosh G3 Mini Tower

Power Macintosh G3 All-In-One

iBook

iBook (FireWire)

PowerBook G3 Series

If you have just upgraded the hard drive on one of the computers listed above and you see this issue occurring, here’s how to get everything running smoothly again:

Back up all your data. (This is a good thing to do regularly, not just now!)

Start up from your Mac OS installation or restore disc.

Use Drive Setup (in Mac OS 8 or 9) or Disk Utility (Mac OS X) to partition the drive. Make the first partition smaller than 8 GB, and any other partitions can be any size you want.

Install the Mac OS in the first drive partition.