Macintosh SE - Finder error 41 on startup

[BacioiuC]

Hi everyone,

Yesterday I've installed a Total Systems Mercury accelerator in my Macintosh SE. Been playing and working on it on and off through the entire day yesterday without any issues and went through a couple of power cycles. Worked without any issues.

Today I've booted up the Mac and it initially told me that "it doesn't have enough memory to load all the extensions". I disabled all extensions, to figure out which was causing an issue and it booted into a  "Sorry, a system error occurred. "Finder" error type 41 ". Note that it has 4 MB of ram and it ran perfectly until now.

I've turned off all extensions (from the Extension Manager) and this issue still occurs. I can restart the Mac with the shift key pressed and it boots into System 7.5.3.

With "extensions off" via the shift key, when I start extension manager from the Control Panel I receive an error saying "An Error -127 occurred while getting the information on the following file: EM Extension".

Any idea what the cause might be?

Edit: note, I want to try out a few things before removing the accelerator. Nothing new was installed (except gemstart 3) since putting in the accelerator and it worked through quite a few power-cycles yesterday.


 

 

[BacioiuC]

After booting it with an external SCSI2SD I noticed that it didn't recognize the internal one. So for tests, I've added the original Hard Drive I had with the machine (a new old stock one of about 200 MB but still) and it booted System 6.0.8 from it! So I think that my internal SCSI2SD is dead?

 

[BacioiuC]

Confirmed that the SCSI2SD died. I dd'ed the image on the SDCard and the SDCard is okay. Booted up the image in basilisk II. So the SCSI2SD for some reason got fried or refuses to read that SD card or any other. No idea how to proceed. For now, I plugged in the 200MB HDD and I'm installing System 7.1 on it (the Accelerator Board drivers actually prefer it). Going with System 7.1 in case incompatibility with Gemstart 3 what caused the issue. Friday the 13th amiright?.

 

[Dog Cow]

"Sorry, a system error occurred. "Finder" error type 41 ". Note that it has 4 MB of ram and it ran perfectly until now.

Error 41 usually means "can't load the Finder" typically because the Finder file is missing from the blessed System Folder.

But you might see that error if the Finder is present, but can't be loaded into RAM for some other reason.

 

[BacioiuC]

A few hours after installing 7.1 and setting up everything I ran into another issue. I had a crash in Falcon F16 which asked me to restart the Mac.

Now the SE is stuck on a Happy Mac and won't boot from HDD. The HDD indicator led is active and a few seconds after the happy mac appears it dies out. if I boot from the external SCSI2SD, the HDD is visible without issues. Restarting without the SCSI2SD the same story repeats.

Edit: Trying to access the system folder on the HDD, while running from external SCSI2SD freezes the entire system. Tried zapping the pram (Command + Options + P + R) and nvram (Command + Options + N + V) no result. All other files on the HDD are accessible.

Edit 2:

Running Disk First Aid says that The volume " SE " appears to be okay (where SE is the name of the HDD volume).

 

[BacioiuC]

And I found the issue. A cap seems to have broken off from under the SIMM modules. @Dog Cow was basically right about a problem with loading it into ram. Going to have to send it in for cleaning and a recap. If anyone knows someone in Europe that handles things like this do let me know (I've never been good with a soldering iron, especially on things that small and I don't want to risk ruining the board).

 

[BacioiuC]

After spending the entire day checking traces, scsi cables, ram sticks and a lot of other crap I've ended up at the conclusion that the File System got corrupted somehow, on both the SD card and the HDD. Not sure if it's related to the accelerator or the drive but I'm going to play it safe for a couple of days. 7.1 minimal install with Gemstart 3, CD Rom Drivers and Desk Pictures as the only extensions/control panels added + Think-C, Photoshop and Bard's Tale.

If all goes well for a few days I can start installing other things but I want to be sure nothing causes problems.

P.s. I'm a complete moron and the broken resistor in the screen on the post above was cut by me so I can install 4 MB of ram. I totally forgot and thought the caps and resistors were busted.