Suitable boot floppy for SE/30

[mattbee]

Can anyone suggest a next step here?

I've got an SE/30 which boots from hard drive to "Welcome to Macintosh". But the desktop doesn't come up. The prompt disappears (leaving the white box) and the pointer freezes. If I hold shift, sometimes it will confirm that extensions are disabled, and come up with a "The system disk may be damaged" etc. message, encouraging me to repair the install with a floppy.

So after replacing its floppy drive, I wrote a System 7.0.1 floppy but it won't boot from it. It spins the floppy, reads a little bit, then ejects it and boots from the hard drive again.

I've tried writing with rawwrite on Windows via a USB floppy. I'd also tried converting the .dsk image to Kryoflux's raw files, then writing through my Kryoflux setup. I tried with a couple of different 1.44M floppies. It still rejects the disc.

Am I making any obvious errors here? Next I'm going to try again writing the system disk from a Power Macintosh G3, but was hoping I could reliably manipulate floppy images from Windows.

Thanks in advance.

 

[mattbee]

(the disk appears correct on the Finder on the G3, but the G3's own drive sounds awful and the OS reports disk errors trying to read it )

 

[Fred1212]

Do you know the drive you put in works?
Do you have another early mac to write a system floppy on?
Where are you sourcing from, Mac Garden? Search for Apple System recovery CD and use that to create a new floppy on the G# if the drive is OK

 

[Fred1212]

Is the floppy itself OK they die regularly!

 

[Mk.558]

You can write images from within Windows. You won't need any fancy KryoFlux or other special kit: just a USB 1.44 FDD w/driver and a disk image writer. While you cannot write DC 4.2 images, you can easily convert them with your emulator.

An emulator, like Basilisk II/Mini vMac/Sheepsaver (mini vmac imo is the most reliable, although more recent updates may have improved Basilisk II / Sheepsaver GUI stability) is great to be able to "do stuff".

A good 1.44 disk image? Uhhh, I'd suggest a 6.0.8 network access disk, or a 1.44 hard drive focused disk. Those are also at that link above.

 

[mattbee]

Thanks @Fred1212, I do *not* know that the replacement drive works. I just know it sounds normal - no scraping noise, and the read seems to take the same amount of time before the Mac rejects the disc, the eject works.

I've tried two floppies, and seen the G3 read it enough (kinda, see above, does not make happy noises while it's reading).

@Mk.558 since I'm on a laptop I have two options, a random bus-powered USB floppy drive, or the Kryoflux. I know I don't need more than 1.44MB MFM format for the SE/30 but was getting suspicious so thought I'd try writing with each.

Oh wait guys, here is a broken Performa 400 - will that floppy drive work in the SE/30? The connection looks the same. What are the odds I've got 4 broken floppy drives here?

 

[Mk.558]

They should use the same auto-inject, auto-eject 1.44 floppy drive, yeah. In my experience they're usually choked up with gook and dusty from years of toil and sitting around. A good cleaning, inspection of the motor eject gears, very thin lubrication in key spots usually sorts them out nicely.

 

[ClassicGuyPhilly]

There's a bunch of info about floppy drive cleaning here - https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/rescued-what-i-thought-was-a-mac-ii.44257/post-489303

 

[mattbee]

Gosh, 3 Sony Superdrives and none of them boot. 2 of them give me the Happy Mac, but only for one or two motor clicks, then it rejects it again.

I'm pretty sure the floppies I've used are fine because I can read, write & reimage them OK on my two PC drives.

I might just shell out for a BlueSCSI (or similar) to get the SE/30 booting, and then put the floppy drives into a pile to see if I can make one of them go.

 

[bigmessowires]

It's hard to diagnose from afar, but my bet is on a problem with your floppy disk contents, or a hardware problem with the SE/30, rather than the floppy drives. If the disk itself is good, then I think it's unlikely for two separate floppy drives to work well enough to show a Happy Mac but not well enough to get any further.

From memory: The Happy Mac icon appears when the Mac's ROM successfully loads the first sector from the disk and verifies that it has some expected signature bytes. After that, the just-loaded code is executed and begins to load the rest of the operating system from disk. If there's a problem at this point, like a System Folder that isn't blessed or other disk issue, it may eject the disk like you're seeing. What source did you use to create the disk? If there's any doubt, you could get someone to send you a known-good floppy disk, or get something like my Floppy Emu disk emulator.

On the hardware side, it's also possible something in the SE/30 is causing the failures you're seeing. The first sector is loaded from track 0, and if something is preventing the drive from stepping beyond track 0 then you'd also see behavior like you're getting. There are five I/O signals from the Mac to the floppy drive that control stepping and other behaviors, and if one of these is broken then it might prevent any drives from stepping correctly. It's possible that trouble with the +12V supply might also cause stepping motor problems.

 

[LaPorta]

Not to be a killjoy, but if you wind up going the FloppyEmu or some other route...I'll gladly take a non-working Sony drive off of you!

 

[mattbee]

Ahhh I just reseated everything while changing the memory, left the disc in and it booted off the floppy just fine!

 

[mattbee]

Ah it seems to depend on how I insert it - the latching seems very "mushy" and sometimes a little poke with a pencil will change the Mac's opinion of whether the disc is readable. Maybe it just needs some careful cleaning and oiling, thanks for the tips on that everyone

 

[Syjeklye]

Ah it seems to depend on how I insert it - the latching seems very "mushy" and sometimes a little poke with a pencil will change the Mac's opinion of whether the disc is readable. Maybe it just needs some careful cleaning and oiling, thanks for the tips on that everyone

I would definitely clean it and re-grease everything. I had to do that for 2 Mac Pluses and their drives are perfect now.

 

[dochilli]

Cleaning of a floppy disk drive: