Color Classic II + dead PRAM battery = blinking ? at POST?

[Huxley]

Hi gang!

I recently pulled one of my old project machines from storage after ~10 years. This is a Color Classic that I long ago upgraded to a Color Classic II motherboard, 36 megs of RAM and a PDS Ethernet card. I was delighted to hear the chimes and watch it boot to System 7.5.5 on the first try yesterday, and everything was working great... for a little while. After confirming that the machine was working well, I hooked up an old LaCie ZPF SCSI drive to the external SCSI port and powered it all back up - no problem.

HOWEVER.

After that, every time I power up the CCII, it either tries to boot from that LaCie drive (if it's connected / powered on) which fails due to incompatible system software, or (if the LaCie drive is disconnected / powered off) I just get the blinking ? of doom from the internal drive. I can hear the internal drive spinning and going through its power-on routine, but otherwise I can't get it to boot from the internal HDD.

I do know that the PRAM battery is totally shot - is that likely to be behind the issue I'm seeing? Any other thoughts? Zapping the PRAM hasn't helped resolve it yet, so I might pick up another PRAM battery just in case....

 

[jjex22]

Hi there, I'm still new to the old macs, but it could be that it's defaulting to the wrong default drive?

I believe resetting the pram is the same one the older macs -

cmd+option+p+r

And I'm pretty sure you can tell it to boot from a particular SCSI with cmd+option+shift+del+the number of the drive, which would be 0 for the internal? So

Cmd+option+shift+del+0?

Maybe worth a shot until someone more knowledgeable sees this

 

[Elfen]

You may need either Norton Emergency Boot Floppy or a System Boot Disk with Disk First Aid. It sounds like your boot blocks or system sectors got corrupted. This should fix it.

After that, boot with the CCII by itself and go into the control panel and set Start Up Disk.

 

[uniserver]

Sounds like your boot drive is going bad. Boot off a floppy and see if the hd still shows up… 

If it does, see if your system folder is still blessed.