As Gerald suggested, I tried disconnecting the serial cable, which allowed the board to boot. Changing the minicom instructions in the following way allowed the board to boot with the serial cable connected:
ctl-a, z, o, "modem and dialing" remove entries for items A - L save as the default file. I am looking into converting over to ckermit. Thanks Wolfgang and Gerald for responding to my question. best regards, Todd ** Sent via the linuxppc-embedded mail list. See http://lists.linuxppc.org/
