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SE/30 not booting from hard drive

X

xfcrowman

6502
I have been working on a Mac SE/30 restoration and it is exhibiting a strange problem where it can't boot from a SCSI hard drive. To start, I replaced all the electrolytic capacitors and cleaned the board with alcohol to get rid of any remaining electrolyte. After the re-cap the SE/30 boots from the floppy drive and it the SCSI drive also shows up and can be used.

However, if I try booting from the drive it hangs on the "Welcome to Macintosh" screen. Activity sounds continue from the SCSI drive continue even though it doesn't complete the boot process. I have also tried using a SCSi2SD with the same result.

From here I am guessing that I may have one or more bad traces from the cap leakage, or possibly a bad SCSI cable? Has anyone else resolved a similar issue?

 
It feels very unlikely to me that you are having a hardware problem (bad traces or bad cable) and the SCSI drive would show up and work perfectly if you start from a floppy.  It sounds much more likely there is something on your hard drive causing an incompatibility.

Have you tried booting with extensions off?

Have you tried installing a fresh OS on the HD (try 6.0.8, nice and small and compatible) and booting from that?

 
Normally I would suspect the hard drive as well, but in this case I can get it to boot from my Mac SE. The same is also true of the SCSI2SD - it works just fine in my Mac Performa and Mac SE but not the SE/30. This is why I suspect there is something still wrong with the logic board

 
Also if the data and/or clock traces between Via and RTC/PRAM are broken you won’t be able to boot from HDD.

I am not totally sure though if it starts to boot and then hangs or if it wouldn’t boot at all. It’s been some time ago when I had a board on my bench where this was the problem.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
I ran into this same issue with my first SE/30. It happened 100% of the time with a modded ROM trying to boot 7.5.5. System 6 was fine. Putting the original ROM back in it would boot 7.5.5 okay most of the time. It still sometimes hangs in the welcome to Mac screen which I attribute to some intermittent vias at the SCSI chip as techknight mentioned. I still haven’t resolved that completely, though. 

 
Nope, but you’re totally right, I now remember I realized that after the fact :)  Hopefully that helps the OP. 

 
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