Mac SE won't boot from ext BlueSCSI - sad mac

[neonfire]

Before I bought it the person had a video of it booting up off the internal HD. When I went to pick it up it wasn't booting fully but I think the HD is just bad, nbd. It chimes fine. I tried using my bluescsi ext to boot off that, but when I try (and it works on my classic II just fine) I get a sad mac:

0000000F
00000002

I have some new ram coming from Jurassic Computing but idk if that's really the issue. I haven't recapped yet, but I did a deep clean and checked everything and all the caps seem fine. It was dusty but no rust or corrosion.

I can't try the floppy drive as it is not working well at all, though I could probably put the classic II's floppy drive in and try that, or even the HD from the classic, idk.

 

[cheesestraws]

0000000F/0000002 is an address error.

 

[neonfire]

0000000F/0000002 is an address error.

So the new RAM should fix that? That's what I was thinking, but wanted to make sure.

 

[cheesestraws]

Could do. It's not actually that helpful from a diagnostics perspective, unfortunately. It could be dodgy RAM; it could be corrupt system software, it could be the system not dealing well with another hardware failure. All it means is "something tried to address memory in an unaligned way and it's before the Deep Shit, I mean system error, handler gets installed' I would suggest trying a different system installation.

 

[neonfire]

Could do. It's not actually that helpful from a diagnostics perspective, unfortunately. It could be dodgy RAM; it could be corrupt system software, it could be the system not dealing well with another hardware failure. All it means is "something tried to address memory in an unaligned way and it's before the Deep Shit, I mean system error, handler gets installed' I would suggest trying a different system installation.

I'll try running the system with just two sticks of the ram I have, and no floppy or hd, just the Bluescsi. Thanks for the info!

 

[finkmac]

i'm pretty sure you need four sticks...

 

[neonfire]

i'm pretty sure you need four sticks...

ah dang, then I'll just have to wait for the new ones. didn't know if I could get away with 2

 

[larwe]

ah dang, then I'll just have to wait for the new ones. didn't know if I could get away with 2

The Mac SE has a 16-bit bus and you can use 2 SIMMs at a time for configurations of 1MB (4x256K), 2.5MB (2x1MB+2x256K, weird combo and not recommended) or 4MB (4x1MB). The SE/30 has a 32-bit bus and requires SIMMs to be installed in matching groups of 4 (8 slots, max official capacity 8MB with 8x1MB SIMMs) - it also supports 16MB SIMMs unofficially.

 

[Byrd]

2.5MB in a Plus, SE was a perfectly good poor man’s upgrade in the day, not sure why not recommended And then the spare sticks you turned into keyrings!

 

[larwe]

2.5MB in a Plus, SE was a perfectly good poor man’s upgrade in the day, not sure why not recommended And then the spare sticks you turned into keyrings!

Well, it probably is a lot less problematic now when 30-pin RAM is all salvage and you can find anything you want for tinybucks. But back in 1987 when our school lab was upgrading the 1MB Pluses, someone said "we can save money by only going to 2.5 instead of 4" and it was really an issue (for us, anyway) finding RAM that played nice together in a 512/2MB bank configuration. Of course part of the reason was that we were ordering from PC vendors, not Mac-specific vendors (shrug). But I recall ordering RAM basically sight unseen, and having to return it if it didn't work, and try ordering again later (when the vendor had a batch in from a different supplier).

 

[larwe]

BTW I should have stated - we had 256K SIMMs that would work happily as 4x256K, and 1MB SIMMs that would work happily as 4x1MB, but split those same modules up and do two and two and the machine either didn't boot at all or was unstable. I miss those times. Not.

 

[adespoton]

Ah; the days of 30-pin SIMM voodoo. What I eventually ended up doing was making sure those SIMMs were always labelled as working pairs, and never broke them up. One of my expansion boards had space for 16 SIMMs, and that was a real headache to get right. I ended up pulling pairs of 512KB SIMMs from HP printer upgrades for most of it, as they were plentiful and cheap, and generally just worked.

 

[ESM-NL]

-