I had a IIsi develop terminal hard drive trouble today. This is usually not a problem because I always keep a couple of old SCSI drives packed up in anti-static wrap in my parts stash. I also have a nice G3 with a secondary (SCSI) bus in it, so I don't have to worry about corrupted floppies and malfunctioning floppy drives.
Anyway, I tested the bad drive to make sure it was trash, pulled a replacement out of my stash and re-formatted it because it had OS 7.5 installed. I needed it to have 7.1, so that's what I installed. I then dropped the drive into the IIsi and turned it on. The drive would not boot, and I was treated to a flashing question mark. I pulled it back out of the IIsi and checked it with Tech Tools and Diskwarrior. The drive showed up fine on the G3's desktop, and registered no problems. I put it back in the IIsi. No success, and a flashing question mark. I know I reformatted correctly, into Standard format and not Extended. I checked. I don't know why it will not boot. My floppy drives are unreliable, because the environment in which we use them is very dirty. I tried booting from a floppy, but that only got me a flashing X. Again, there appears to be nothing wrong with the drive when it is not being used as the Startup drive. I would like to salvage it, because low volume SCSI drives are getting harder and harder to find, and I have three machines which require them. I had another spare, and it ended up working fine, but I didn't have to re- format that one. What's bothering me is that I have done this before, and not had any problems. Is there something I need to do to "bless" the system folder? Are there hard drives that will not boot into an OS prior to 7.5? Thanks in advance for any advice. -- ----- You received this message because you are a member of the Vintage Macs group. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/vintagemacs.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To leave this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/vintage-macs Support for older Macs: http://lowendmac.com/services/
