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My "New" Mac IIfx Sees My Seagate ST-225N as a "Large Volume That Cannot Be Used"

joshc

Well-known member
I've suggested a few things in this thread to help you but I'm not sure if you've tried any of them yet.

You need to remove the variables and complexity here to make this easier to diagnose. Try another drive. Try another system version, 7.5.5 has been recommended and I sent you a link of where to get it.

Having two systems on one disk may not be helping - it sounds like there may be corruption or conflicts. Start over with just one OS to start with, on a known reliable disk. It sounds like your old drive may not be reliable and could be causing some of the errors?
 

Phipli

Well-known member
I've suggested a few things in this thread to help you but I'm not sure if you've tried any of them yet.

You need to remove the variables and complexity here to make this easier to diagnose. Try another drive. Try another system version, 7.5.5 has been recommended and I sent you a link of where to get it.

Having two systems on one disk may not be helping - it sounds like there may be corruption or conflicts. Start over with just one OS to start with, on a known reliable disk. It sounds like your old drive may not be reliable and could be causing some of the errors?
And turn off the weird silverlining id feature and fit a physical jumper for now. Just to remove an unknown. Given what is going on is just what I'd expect from I'd conflicts.
 

Concorde1993

Well-known member
I removed the Silverlining partition I had on my internal Quantum 1.2GB drive and created a new partition using Drive Utility 1.4 (the partitions created were OS 8.1 and System 6.0.8 - no System 7 stuff here).

For whatever reason, this original caps IIfx doesn’t like switching from 32-bit to 24-bit mode and vice-versa. I’m currently in OS 8.1 and when I want to switch to 6.0.8 using Startup Disk, the IIfx completely ignores 6.0.8 and stays in 8.1 (the one time I got through to 6.0.8 I received a system bomb when trying to get back to 8.1). My HD is good (it’s been scanned so many times by Norton and Disk First Aid for bad blocks) and I can rule out Silverlining as the fault of this nonsense. I don’t have an external SCSI drive running in the background so there’s no bus errors or ID conflicts here.

Unless I’ve missed something I’m just going to leave 8.1 and 6.0.8 on separate HDs. I can switch without issue between other 32-bit OSes in either Silverlining or Apple’s own concoction.
 

mg.man

Well-known member
I *think* 6.x (and maybe even 7.x(7.0.x?) needs to be the first partition on the drive? Also, the "newer" SCSI driver installed by Drive Utility (did you mean Drive Setup?) may cause issues with 6.x (that's just a guess). If 6.0.8 is not the first partition, it might be worth starting again and using a more contemporary Drive "setup" program to partition the drive for both 6.0.8 and 8.1.
 

Concorde1993

Well-known member
6.0.8 was set as the first partition and 8.1 was set as the second. Didn't matter if I used Silverlining or Drive Setup (not Drive Utility) to create the partition - 6.0.8 wouldn't boot into 8.1 and 8.1 would completely ignore the 6.0.8 partition. I can boot into 7.5.1 from 6.0.8 (7.5.1 is installed on my external M2115 Apple drive) if I do not have the 8.1 system software installed. So for some reason there's a conflict when wanting to switch between 6.0.8 and 8.1 (no system bombs this time around). Would Gamba's 68030 ResEdit hacks have anything to do with 8.1 not wanting to cooperate with 6.0.8? Just a thought.

Pic of my partition in Drive Setup:
#1.jpg
I haven't tried FWB Hard Disk Toolkit 3.0 - might give it a shot to see if it makes a difference. Otherwise I'll just install 6.0.8 on the internal 1.2GB Quantum drive (although 1.2GB of space is ludicrous for 6.0.8 - 200MB is good enough just for 7.1) and upgrade my external M2115 drive to 8.1 (I imagine that Gamba's ResEdit hacks will work on external SCSI drives too).
 
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joshc

Well-known member
What does SCSI Probe show?

It would be interesting to see what FWB HDT shows as well.

What does System Picker show, does it recognise all three drives/partitions as having a bootable OS on them?

If you wanted 6.0.8 on the 1.2GB drive, you could still partition that, so that there's a small (100-200MB) partition for System 6, and then another partition for other things.
 

Phipli

Well-known member
- 6.0.8 wouldn't boot into 8.1 and 8.1
I think this is just a thing? Is it a problem? I /think/ my IIci does the same. It certainly won't restart in System 6 from 8.5. 8.5 just pretends 6 doesn't exist.

Note that there are no machines that officially support both 6 and 8. So it was a reasonable assumption for apple to exclude System 6 options from the Mac OS 8 Startup Disk.
 
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joshc

Well-known member
I think this is just a thing? Is it a problem? I /think/ my IIci does the same. It certainly won't restart in System 6 from 8.5. 8.5 just pretends 6 doesn't exist.

Not that there are no machines that officially support both 6 and 8. So it was a reasonable assumption for apple to exclude System 6 options from the Mac OS 8 Startup Disk.
I was starting to wonder that, might be expected behaviour. There was a huge gap in time between System 6 and OS 8.

I just checked to see if any edition of the Mac Bible covered this scenario and it didn't, at least not the 1998 or 2002 editions.
 

MrFahrenheit

Well-known member
I would suggest:

1. Partition drive with FWB HDT. Correction... don't do this.
2. Setup a small first 100MB-200MB partition for system 6. This allows the driver to exist together with a partition that is a small size. I have found that if your first partition is too large you’ll also have problems with the system not reading the disk driver on boot.
3. Setup a partition for Mac OS 8.1. Do not use HFS+ on any partitions, as this will play havoc with System 6.

I would suggest you use two separate physical drives for System 6 and for Mac OS 8.1, and a different formatting tool for System 6 as you do for Mac OS 8.1. The hard disk driver version must be compatible with the operating system you are running. Using third party tools like FWB or SilverLining is great, but can be dangerous when going between such vast differences in system software versions. I had initially recommended FWB, however, there's a version specifically made for Mac OS 8.1 and above, and it's not compatible with Mac OS 7.5.3 and prior. So one version is required for a System 6 drive and another version for Mac OS 8.1. However, if you use the same tool, but different versions, for two drives, it could still pose problems.

I do believe switching from Mac OS 8.1 back to System 6 will be unsupported and likely cause problems.

I haven’t used system 6 and Mac OS 8 on the same machine so I don’t know whether switching from 6 to 8 is safe/possible. You may have to put Mac OS 8 on a different physical drive. In which case you can choose which system you want to boot by the SCSI ID on power up.

In that case you would hold command option shift delete followed by a drive ID number. This tells the Mac to boot the system software from the first partition of whatever drive ID you indicate.

If system 6 was on a drive ID 0, it would be command option shift delete 0, until you see the happy Mac. If you wanted to boot MacOS 8.1 on drive ID 2, you would power off, press power key, and immediately hold command option shift delete 2 until happy Mac.
 
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Concorde1993

Well-known member
What does System Picker show
Not sure, don't have that app installed. I know that all three OSes show up in Startup Disk.
I think this is just a thing? Is it a problem?
Not really a problem, more of an inconvenience.
Setup a small first 100MB-200MB partition for system 6. This allows the driver to exist together with a partition that is a small size
The System 6 partition was set for 246MB, and the 8.1 partition for 973MB (or thereabouts). Silverlining and Drive Setup both automatically create a driver on the HD that shows as a separate partition (I don't know if there's a way to combine the HD driver inside the OS partition - it shouldn't make a difference anyway).
I do believe switching from Mac OS 8.1 back to System 6 will be unsupported and likely cause problems.
It likely is from what I've seen anyway. As mentioned earlier, I can boot between 7.5 and 6.0.8 without problems - as long as both drives have proper working SCSI IDs and there's no presence of 8.1
 
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