Quadra 900 refusing to boot normally

[valejacobo]

Hi y'all, it's your boy valito here.
About a week ago I finally got hold of a new floppy drive for my Quadra 900 since the original one refused to read/write anything. So far so good, everything works as intended, and I finally got to install a couple apps on it. But since, it refuses to boot up in the normal fashion, it hangs at this particular extension:


If I just CMD+ Shift + S it ignores the extensions loading, and I'm able to get to the desktop. Thing is, that looking around and poking a little bit on the hard drive, I found nothing similar to that, nor the program that belongs to it. Anyone has a clue on what it is, or at least a way to know what extensions load at the boot besides looking at said folder?

 

[Byrd]

It looks like some sort of control panel for a graphics card that potentially isn't inside your Mac. I'd reinstall the lot to be honest and start fresh.

What OS are you running?

 

[cheesestraws]

That looks like an extension for a Supermac graphics card. If you go into the Extensions or Control Panels folder inside the System Folder you should find something with a similar icon, or perhaps with the name Supermac in it. Yoink it out, throw it in the bin. But yes, would also recommend a fresh installation...

 

[valejacobo]

I'll get rid of the supermac ones, since the card is no longer installed. About a fresh install, I'm tempted, but I don't think I have enough fresh floppies to make the installer.

 

[Byrd]

If you have another Mac, you can do the DiskCopy shuffle reimaging the installer images on only a handful of floppy discs. It's not fun, but I'm guessing a lot of us have been there in this hobby!

There is nothing like a fresh install especially if glutted with files and extensions you don't need.

 

[valejacobo]

Well, after a couple boots and restarts, it damaged the hard drive itself. Now I have a non-booting machine and the Disk Tools Floppy I made on my win2k machine won't boot it either. Any leads on what I can do? The only working computer with a floppy drive is this one.

 

[Byrd]

Time for some new floppy discs, and if the HD is hosed look into something like a SCSI2SD V6

 

[cheesestraws]

Yeah. Fortunately, as I posted in another thread, there are multiple good options for SCSI HD replacement, depending on what you're comfortable with and your budget... the useful thing here about an SD based thing rather than an adapter for a newer HD (sorry, Max!) is that you'd be able to install the software on an emulator and then copy it onto the SD card with a modern machine, rather than have to muck about with floppies.

 

[valejacobo]

Little update, I've made a working boot floppy with the Win2k machine, with a disk image tool of some sort I can't recall now, but it booted up, but on the disk repair/format stage I've come to a dead SCSI drive. I'll scout my local marketplace for a replacement since solid state adapters are a dead end in my country and I'm not in the interests of importing one yet.

 

[Byrd]

You might be able to find a cheap BlueSCSI kit in your country, performance is lacking but it'd do the job until you can source a faster replacement.

Don't forget the use of third party formatting utilities such as Lido, Silver Lining, Hard Disk Toolkit which can sometimes get you over the line to detect and format a marginal hard disk. When I say "sometimes", if Apple's (patched) HD formatting utilities can't find it or format it's pretty much done for, but might give you some usage.