HELP! Mac plus booting from zip, screen freaks out

[markyb86]

I have a Mac plus working just fine from floppy.

When I hook up an external zip, ID 6 no other device, termination is on... I hold the mouse button down while powering it up to get it to boot from the scsi.

There is a crazy static sound and then this:

:'(

Have I done something to upset the gods?

Maybe one of their disciples here can help me with this?

 

[Macdrone]

Are you sure its an actual shielded scsi acble? The thin parrallel cables fit but are not shielded like real scsi cables (If I am wrong on that no flame spray please just laugh and move on ). Is it on the correct side of the mac? ( They usually have a picture that shows it not on top or left side of it ). I hope its not your scsi chip as others have mentioned issues here about them going out in other macs, but hopefully your issue is minor.

 

[markyb86]

Hmmm. yes this cable has the <|> symbol on it. And, I hooked it into both ports on the back of the zip drive... well what I mean is I had it in the one labeled zip, like it shows on the drive instructions... then after the problem occured I tried the other port with the same deal....

 

[uniserver]

Have you tried booting off floppy,

and selecting the zip disk as boot drive through start up disk in control panel?

 

[markyb86]

Got it to work with a different zip disk, however I don't know what about holding the mouse button made it freak out like that.

It's working just fine now, however.

 

[CC_333]

Hi,

Since I sold you that Plus, I feel particularly compelled to offer assistance (which I will gladly do), so here goes:

Sometimes, an improperly formatted disk can cause a machine to crash like that (although I've only seen the Sad Mac in my experiences).

When that happens, you should try with no disk in the ZIP drive (and don't hold down the mouse button, if that seems to be causing problems), wait for the machine to fully boot up from a floppy, then try inserting the problem ZIP disk, open Apple HD SC Setup (or some other formatting utility) and format the drive (or, at the very least, update* the drivers).

This is how I solve the problem when it comes up (which isn't very often), and it seems to work most of the time.

By the way, feel free to contact me directly whenever you have a problem. I know that machine pretty well.

c

*I think this is caused by the disk drivers being too new for the machine, which causes it to crash. Updating, in this instance, replaces that incompatible driver with one the machine understands (and can boot from).

 

[markyb86]

That's basically what fixed it. I had to format a new zip on the SE and copy its hard drive over, and then everything was fine.

Thanks!