Mac Plus question mark NOT blinking?

[techknight]

Very rarely do I get stumped, but I got one for you that stumped me: 

I have 2 macintosh Plus boards, both of them do the exact same thing. Both came in macs. They power up, but show the disk icon with a question mark that does NOT blink. the show solid. Now when I insert a disk, they boot fine. 

This is with, or without the 68030 accelerator that I have. 

But they both have something in common. They dont recognize/boot from my SCSI Zip drive. the LED flashes 1 time on the drive, and thats it. nothing further. 

I do remember when I messed with them a couple years ago, I tried my jaz disk setup on my SE/30 the mac would go sad mac with corrupt video the instant i inserted and picked up the jaz disk, but I chalked it up to bad drivers. 

any ideas? 

 

[techknight]

Nevermind. the FDD has to be plugged in LOL. the FDD seized and appeared to have munched its eject motor, so I decided to ignore the drive. But apparently the plus, the drive has to be connected to function correctly.

I was using an external when I was booting from the boot disks. 

 

[Paralel]

Good bit of knowledge for the rest of us though.

 

[Elfen]

And knowing is half the battle.
...
..
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G-I-JOE!!!!

 

[techknight]

well my spare 800K drive is hit or miss anyway. 

I know there was a thread somewhere, but I need to use my PB1400 to prep a ZIP boot disk for my Plus. 

I do know the later iomega driver isnt compatible, but I am probably going to use apple drivers on the zip disk. Just got to figure out how to prep it and with which software. 

fun fun fun. 

 

[Elfen]

A bootable Zip Disk should be treated like a hard drive - partition, format, install OS on it. You might need the IOmega extension in it but I highly doubt it. I have a 1GB Jazz Drive that has a Bootable 1GB Disk with System 6 & 7, and neither system folder needs the IOmega driver. It just boots like a hard drive.

 

[unity]

good tip mike, thanks.

 

[techknight]

A bootable Zip Disk should be treated like a hard drive - partition, format, install OS on it. You might need the IOmega extension in it but I highly doubt it. I have a 1GB Jazz Drive that has a Bootable 1GB Disk with System 6 & 7, and neither system folder needs the IOmega driver. It just boots like a hard drive.

Yea, I know. I just have to be careful and pay special attention to the software I use to format it, and the drivers it places onto the disk. because the plus is picky. 

 

[techknight]

Well, I decided to format a zip disk with LIDO and copy over a system folder. Moved the LIDO init and a disk tools image onto a floppy to make sure everything is ok. 

So i went back over to the plus, the ZIP doesnt boot. So i tossed my disk tools with lido init in the 800k driver, and it picked up the zip disk and showed the system folder as blessed. But no detection on startup. 

hmmm....

 

[Elfen]

Termination on in the Zip Drive?

 

[techknight]

As I said, zip drive is fine. I can boot the Plus from my 800K disk and it automounts the Zip Disk. 

I used the LIDO pMount app to make sure the drive was set up as startup, and it is. 

Soon as I reboot, it goes back to a blinking question mark. Wont boot from the Zip. But as soon as I stick my boot disk in the drive and boot from that, it mounts the Zip disk fine. 

I did format the zip disk using Lido on my PB180. Which is running System 7. But I copied a System 7 folder on the Zip disk so it should not matter. 

I am starting to feel like an idiot, back in the day I used to know all this crap. 

 

[techknight]

Trying a format on the plus itself. 

Its interesting to see what happens when I grabbed another zip disk that had the updated iomega driver. the screen does some stuff that looks like bad caps on a motherboard. LOL.... 

So I had to boot up first into lido, then insert the disk. otherwise it goes psycho. 

 

[techknight]

Grr... Just formatted the disk with Lido on the Mac Plus booted into System 6. Dragged the system 6 folder over, and well, no boot. 

 

[Elfen]

It can be trying, I know.

 

[techknight]

Tried the patched HD SC Setup and it doesnt see the drive. Probably becuase its "removable"

So, I am trying silverlining 5.8.3 now.

This cant be THAT difficult. Really?

 

[Elfen]

I don't remember it being that difficult, but once I learned it how too. I believe it was formatting with Apple SCSI or HD Prep and then dragging and blessing the system folder and then formatting it again with IOmega tools. Thing is, I believe, to do it in System 6 to boot in System 6.

 

[techknight]

Well I am not booting system 7. Just 6.

So i tried silverlining, it formatted and everything was good. But again, not being detected or loading the driver at startup. Ugh.

I did a query, it appears Apple43 is the driver being installed on the disk.

Problem is, I dont know if that driver is compatible with the plus, because Apple43 is SCSI Manager 4.3? Well the plus ROM doesnt have 4.3

 

[Ferrix97]

I had quite a few issues with my plus and the Zip, in the end, I made a bootable 44MB SyQuest and that worked perfectly on the first try!

Also my 800k drive doesn't work, I replaced it with a Sony FDHD drive (From a Macintosh IIsi) and now the machine works flawlessly, you still can't read HD disks, but it still boots 400k and 800k floppy's

 

[techknight]

Guh.. I am an idiot.

the key to this whole thing is the REQUIREMENT of having an UNTAINTED system extension of Iomega 4.2 Driver.

If I drop that extension onto my boot disk while removing all the others, it will mount the disk like normal.

Difference is, when I restarted, PRESTO it booted off of the zip disk.

The key is that extension.