SE/30 with Purple Rom won't boot.

[SpaceFlightOrange]

HI. First post here, looking for some advice.

I have an SE/30 I have recently saved. I've fully cleaned and recapped the logic board, and cleaned everything else. I'll get around to recapping the analog board/PSU at some point but everything seems stable.

I recently put in a BlueSCSI V2 and and I have also been able to successfully boot from a DB25 BlueSCSI.

The machine had 5mb ram that I had cobbled together by swapping Simms round from my other compact Macs, but I decided to upgrade so bought a 16mb purple Simm pack and a purple rom from Tindie.

It's all gone in ok but I can no longer boot from either internal or external SCSI, only floppy. once booted, the drives appear and are accessible, but when I tried to run HD Setup from the System & boot disk, it couldn't detect the drive. When I open about from finder, It does register all 16mb.

I'm thinking im doing something wrong here and it's due to it having 32-bit enabled, but I did try booting from a 6.0.8 floppy and that told me I was in 32-bit mode and I could change to 24-bit to boot, which worked, but when I tried booting from SCSI again, still didn't work.

Only things is swapping the old rom back in, with the new ram, and I haven't tried is a blank image on the BlueSCSI and an install from floppy. that's next.

Any advice would be welcome.

Thanks

 

[SpaceFlightOrange]

So, an update.

I set up a blank image and booted from a System 7.0 floppy disk. I was asked to initialise the drive which I did, and then I copied the system folder from the floppy to the HDD image and rebooted. it booted up with this configuration.

I then tried swapping the rom out for the original and keeping the 16mb in place. The machine will now boot from the pre-made images I was previously trying, and also HD Setup (7.3.5) will see the SCSI device and report the correct ID.

Currently, with 16mb and the original rom, it's booted a 7.5.5 image and can see all 16mb.

I feel like this is possible something I'm doing but I'm pretty much unfamiliar with a 32-bit clean setup, and the SE/30 in general.

 

[dougg3]

Welcome to the forum!

I'm not familiar with the exact purple ROM you're talking about, but I'm guessing it comes pre-programmed with some kind of 32-bit clean ROM image like a IIsi ROM.

Your most recent message mentioning 7.5.5 is a big clue. 6.x, 7.0, and 7.1 don't have any problems booting from a IIsi ROM in an SE/30, but newer versions do. The SE/30 can't boot from System 7.5.x when it has a newer ROM installed, unless you patch files in the System Folder with ResEdit. Maybe the SCSI devices you're testing all have System 7.5.x installed?

Here are a couple of references about this problem and how to use ResEdit to patch it. One thing to point out is I believe once you've patched it, your OS install won't boot from the stock SE/30 ROM anymore until you revert the patch.

• https://www.bigmessowires.com/mac-se30-with-upgraded-rom/
• https://vintageapple.org/gamba2/os8_se30.html

 

[SpaceFlightOrange]

Brilliant! Thankyou!

I never realised this. I made the assumption that i needed to be on a later version of the OS for this to work. I'm fairly certain that the earliest image i tried was 7.5.3. But, yes, i was able to boot off a 7.0.0 floppy and HD image no problem.

I've got the old rom back in now, with a clean 7.5.5 image, so I'll do a bit of reading from the links you have shared and the replace the ROM with the new one.

 

[Chopsticks]

its probably handy to have a copy of system picker installed too,
regardless if you hold 'R' at boot you should be able to boot a system 7 install from the ROM disc, from there you can use resedit to modify the 7.5.x system file on you HDD image following the instructions in the the links posed above. then just reboot and you're done. should take less the 5min even for someone who's not familiar with using resedit.

 

[SpaceFlightOrange]

Finally able to try this and yes! it's booting into 7.5.5 with 32 Bit addressing. Thanks

The original sales page in Tindie did mention the patch and the rom boot but in the moment I have completely forgotten about that and thought the worst!

Thanks for your help