Odd 5300ce behavior (won't boot to floppy unless nvram is reset)

[FacnyFreddy]

So I got my trusty mSATA to IDE adapter installed and it took some acrobatics to get the Disk Tools from OS 8.1 to get recognized by my Powerbook.

Here is the setup

I put the floppy in the drive

I power up, get to the grey screen, mouse moves and trackpad works

But, it never seeks the floppy.

So, I reboot with Cntr-Option-N-V (reset NVram) and then the next boot, it sees the floppy and goes into DiskTools.

I partitioned and formatted the drive.

Ejected the diskette

Rebooted

Grey screen with mouse again.

There is no PRAM battery installed and there is no battery in the bay. Just the wall jack.

Thoughts? Its not dead, just, goes into a "zombie" state.

 

[FacnyFreddy]

Hmm... so I transplanted my drive the from 5300cs into the 5300ce and it works fine. Maybe because there are no pram batteries and no OS on the drives its having issues.

I'll report back after I rebuid the drive from scratch using the 5300cs.