SE/30 hangs booting

[pondosinatra]

Seems like everytime I fire up one of these systems something fails. Guaranteed....

The latest is a working system put in storage for a couple months that now won't boot.....you get the happy Mac....Welcome to Macintosh screen and then nothing. Doesn't matter if I boot off a floppy or the hard drive. If I swap everything (logic board, memory, cache, hard drive) into another se/30 system it boots fine. I also tried replacing the power supply with a brand new one from Artmix and it does the same thing.

Ideas???

[spiceyokooko]

What do you mean by 'nothing'? What do you get?

Does it just freeze at the 'Welcome to Macintosh' screen and doesn't go any further? If so thats likely to be software. Getting a bong and Happy Mac icon means it's passing its hardware checks and starting to load the software, if it hangs at that stage it's something in software it's trying to load it doesn't like.

[pondosinatra]

Yes it hangs at the Welcome to Macintosh screen.

But it doesn't matter what hard drive I try in it - from other working SE/30's....and it doesn't matter if I try booting with an OS 7.5 boot floppy. Same result.

[spiceyokooko]

Hmm that's curious.

Have you done the usuals of checking the PRAM battery voltage and resetting the PRAM? Have you doubled checked all the cables are clean and seated correctly as well as the RAM?

[pondosinatra]

So I swapped the logic board and memory, rom into another se/30 and it boots fine. But the hard drive from the system having problems into the working se/30 system and it hangs at the welcome to mac screen.

So it appears to be the hard drive. But it's weird that it hangs. No system bomb error or anything. And I don't understand why when booting from the OS 7.5 floppy it does the same thing????

[spiceyokooko]

It's interesting that it hangs when booting from floppy as well.

It could well be a corrupted or damaged hard disk driver as that is one of the first things the system will load. If the driver is corrupted it would probably produce the kind of system hangs you're getting.

I'd try booting the machine with the hard disk fully disconnected (from SCSI cable and molex power connector) and try and boot it off floppy that way. If it boots okay without hanging, that's what it is.

[pondosinatra]

Ya that was it. Put in another HD and it booted fine. That sucks.....really, really hard. As the drive I had was an Adtronic SSD someone else sold me - apparently they go for over $1000. Now it's a paperweight after only having used it a couple times. Typical.

[beachycove]

Try reinitializing using a different driver utility?

[pbMacGeek17]

The symptoms you describe for your SE/30 very closely match those I'm experiencing with a Mac LC 575. The system hangs shortly after displaying the "Welcom to Macintosh" screen. Unlike yours, booting from a floppy on my machine does work and the hard drive can be readily read and written to, but without a floppy it will not boot. I initially suspected a hard drive problem and ordered a replacement on EBay, but while waiting I ran a fairly exhaustive series of diagnostic tests to include reinitializing the hard drive and installing a clean OS and trying to boot from a second SCSI device. Result was the same: no hardware problems found, yet I could not boot from any SCSI device Once the hard drive arrives, I'll retest and post resuls, but I wanted to post this in the even someone else encounters the problem. Other than this post, I have not found anything on the Internet that describes this type of failure.

[onlyonemac]

It's probably the hard drive. I had a bad hard drive (it had suffered a head crash) which wouldn't boot. I was then trying to boot from a floppy to try and recover the drive. Every time, it would get halfway through, then soon after the "Welcome to Macintosh" box, it would try and read something off the hard drive, cause said drive to move the heads to the damaged region, drive would reload the driver, and the system would freeze. So just because you're booting from a floppy doesn't mean that the hard drive is ignored.

Alternatively, it could be loading the Finder (do any INITs load before the hang?), which in turn fails to mount the drive, causing a hang.

In any case it's most likely a bad drive, particularly if the good SE/30 failed with the suspected hard drive.