SE/30: Endless startup loop?

[ditabeardmemo]

Hi everyone:

I've encountered a boot problem with my Macintosh SE/30, and given that I'm a novice with these machines, I'm hoping someone here can help me troubleshoot.

The logic board of the machine had Simasimac when I first acquired it, so I recently had it re-capped by forum member Phreakout (thanks again!) Phreakout tested the board on his SE/30 and it worked as expected.

When I received the logic board, I reinstalled the battery (and double checked that it was oriented correctly), reinstalled the RAM and ROM SIMM chips and re-connected the board to the SE/30.

When I first powered on the SE/30, the black arrow appeared in the upper lefthand corner, followed by the "Mac Question Mark" icon, indicating that it could not find the operating system on the hard drive. This was troubling because the hard drive was operating normally prior to the "Simasimac" problem that developed shortly after I first bought it. I then powered off the Mac and double checked all connections between the hard drive and the logic board. When I powered on the Mac again, the black arrow appeared in the upper lefthand corner, followed by the normal "Smiling Mac" icon for 2-3 seconds. But then the "Smiling Mac" disappeared, and the black arrow reappeared, followed again by the "Smiling Mac" icon for 2-3 seconds. This loop repeated endlessly and the machine would never fully boot. I left it on for over an hour to test but with no success.

Thanks in advance to anyone with suggestions!

 

[JRL]

Try booting up from a system disk.

 

[ditabeardmemo]

That's yet another hitch: When I purchased the machine, the boot disk wasn't included because the operating system was on the hard drive. The machine was running OS 7.5.5.

What's the easiest/fastest way for me to obtain a boot disk?

 

[JRL]

Check the PRAM battery voltage and see if the PRAM battery is OK first. If it is, then you can proceed with trying to reinstall a system.

The easiest way is to buy a disk set on eBay for $8-$15, which IMHO is a total ripoff.

This is modified from an earlier reply that I made to somebody with a different (but kind of similar) situation. This is if you were to do this procedure on a PC with XP:

I assume you have a PC with a floppy drive, right? If so, you need to stop by http://68kmacwin.googlepages.com/winmac, a very useful page made by a fellow soldier who goes by the UN benjgvps.
First things first, download the Floppy Image Writer program on that page. I'm pretty sure this works better with an internal floppy drive, but an external one will suffice.

You'll need Stuffit Expander 5 here.

Then, you'll need the Network Access 7.5 file, which you can find here.

Run Stuffit Expander. You'll see a menu like this:

Find the Network Access 7.5 file, and drag it to the Stuffit Expander window. One of the two items you should get from the resulting decompress operation is the actual image file.

Unzip the FLW (what the image writer will now be referred to at this point), and open it up. Have a floppy disk on hand; PC floppies are A-OK.

Click Browse in Write Flopy

-Desktop (or wherever the image is)

-click on the network access image

-Open

Then, stick your floppy in and press Start and Yes.

Insert the floppy inside your SE/30. It should load correctly.

If so, open the disk and copy the system folder to the HD. Seperate the Finder from the old System Folder (drag it to the desktop and keep it there). Rename the old system folder "Old System Folder". "Bless" the new system folder on the HD by dragging the Finder out of it, and dragging it back into the new System Folder. Rename it "Temp System Folder". Restart.

Your SE/30 should restart to a bare System 7.5 install, which you can use as a platform to natively decompress System Disks.

Then, on your PC, download the PC Exchange and the Stuffit Expander 4.0.1 links in the page previously mentioned. THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT STEP!

Open the FLW.

Click Load Image

-Desktop (or wherever else the image is)

-click on the PC Exchange image

-Open

Then, stick your floppy in and press Write Image.

The following is quoted from benjgvps himself:

Now go to your mac and put the disk in, go to your hard drive and find the system folder, then go to the control panel folder, then drag the "PC Exchange" file into the folder. Now your mac can read PC formatted floppies

Open the floppy writer program on your PC and put a floppy in. Click "browse" in the "write floppy" section and find the "stuffitexpander" image. Click "Open", Then "Start", Then "Yes".

Now on your mac go to the floppy and drag the "stuffit expander 4.0.1" folder on your hard drive (Do not drag onto the desktop unless you drag it into a folder on your desktop). To use stuffit expander go into the folder and click stuffit expander, click file and then expand (or "apple key" and "E"), then find the file you want to expand.

Next, download Disk Copy 4.2 here. IMPORTANT STEP #2!

Now, copy it to a PC floppy.

Now, on your Macintosh SE/30, put the Disk Copy floppy in, copy Disk Copy to the HD, and open up Stuffit Expander. Click "File", "Decompress", and find the file you copied. Open it.

click on the resulting Disk Copy .smi when it's on the hard drive.

Disk Copy will self-uncompress and turn into the real program. Feel free to trash the compressed files now.

After that, feel free to download the system files of your choice on your PC, copy them over, decompress them with Disk Copy/Stuffit Expander, install, and enjoy!

-J

 

[Unknown_K]

That's yet another hitch: When I purchased the machine, the boot disk wasn't included because the operating system was on the hard drive. The machine was running OS 7.5.5.
What's the easiest/fastest way for me to obtain a boot disk?

Check to see if there is an Apple support group locally, if so somebody probably collects old macs in it and could provide a set of boot disks.

You can doanload OS 6.08 and 7.01 from Apples website and if you have another mac around with a floppy drive dump them to disk. Basically you just want to make sure the machine will boot from floppy not run it from floppy long term.

 

[phreakout]

I sent you an email, dita. It should give you some tips to try. If you need System 6 or 7 on floppy disks, let me know. I still think it could be the hard drive. Drive "stiction" (pronounced stick-shun) is quite common amongst hard drives that are older than 10 years. I had it happen to a 700MB Quantum SCSI once after not using it for over a year. The drive is in my SE/30 and running System 7.0.1. I ended up slapping the side of the machine in order to get the drive to spin up and work.

73s de Phreakout :rambo:

 

[macgeek417]

My LC III runs through something similar when i turn it on. it happy macs, then reatarts andboots normally.\

:?:

 

[JRL]

My LC III runs through something similar when i turn it on. it happy macs, then reatarts andboots normally.\ :?:

That means it needs a good PRAM battery AFAIK.

 

[Some_Person]

Hmm, my SE does something similar when the System file is present but not the Finder file. Not sure if this is related though.

 

[macgeek417]

My LC III runs through something similar when i turn it on. it happy macs, then reatarts andboots normally.\ :?:

That means it needs a good PRAM battery AFAIK.

So that bumps the amount of dead pram batteries I have up to 3?

 

[JRL]

Yeah.

 

[macgeek417]

Eh. Not like I'm gonna bother replaceing them... The only time i will do that is when I get a mac that needs them to startup.



I'm cheap. $30 is the most I'd pay for an old mac. (Unless it was like a 128k or some other rare one.)

 

[phreakout]

When I worked on ditabeardmemo's board, I made sure to check the battery out. It was reading about 3.67 to 3.68 Vdc. So his battery isn't the issue. I also reset the PRAM while I was at it. I still believe it is a problem with either his hard drive or the fact that some data became corrupt. I'm still working on getting floppies made of System 7.5.3 so I can send it to him, but I'm having trouble trying to get the images to cooperate with me. Most of the disk images are of a "part.bin" filetype and neither OSX or OS 7/8/9 will recognize them. Not even Disk Utility will open them.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

73s de Phreakout. :rambo:

 

[macgeek417]

Um, thats a segmented cd image. I have a .dsk diskset of 7.6 and the 7.6.1 update, complete with disk tools disks. PMming

 

[ditabeardmemo]

While I am awaiting Phreakout's OS disk set, I recently got my PC back up and running Windows XP. Since I can now read and write floppy disks, I checked out JLW's detailed post regarding a method to get the SE/30 to boot from a Network Access system disk. Unfortunately, however, I'm having a lot of trouble.

I followed the instructions to the letter: I downloaded StuffIt, the Network Access archive and the Floppy Image Writer. I bought some new Double Sided, High Density 1.44 MB floppy disks. I formatted the a floppy as a 1.44 MB FAT disk. I then decompressed the Network Access archive, and successfully (I assume) copied it to the floppy using the Floppy Image Writer.

When I popped the floppy in the SE/30 and switched on the unit, however, it would not boot. It simply spit the disk out after a few seconds. I tried the same process with a different disk and had the same result. I also tried the same process on a Mac Classic that I recently acquired, and no dice. The Macs would not boot from the Network Access 7.5 floppy.

Can anyone shed some light on this? Is there a step that I missed?

 

[JRL]

I was doing that from memory, so I might have done something wrong. However, right now I have my copy open here, and you have to do the following:

1: Make sure you have a file called Network Access.image.

2: Open up the Floppy Image program.

3: Under Write Floppy, click Browse.

4: Locate the image file and click "Open"

5: Click "Start"

Tell me if you still have any problems after that, and I'll send you a different bootdisk image.

 

[ditabeardmemo]

Thanks JRL. The only difference I encountered with those instructions is as follows:

1. Wen I de-compress the Network Access archive using StuffIt Expander (per your original instructions), one of the files that appears is called "Network Access.image".

2. When I open the Floppy Image Writer, the only files it allows me to write are with ".img" and ".imz" extensions.

3. I change the "Network Access" extension from ".image" to ".img".

4. I then select "Browse" under "Write Floppy," locate the image file and click "Open," click "Start," and in less than a minute the program makes a sound indicating success.

After following this process, however, the floppy disk I created will not boot in either my Mac SE/30 or my Classic.

Thanks again for your input!

 

[Mac128]

I formatted the a floppy as a 1.44 MB FAT disk

I don't believe you will be able to use a FAT formatted floppy as a boot disk. It must be formatted HFS.

 

[ditabeardmemo]

That was a thought I had, but JLW's original instructions stated that PC floppies are fine, so I never changed the formatting.