Uncreative Labs

Joined: 10 May 2008 Posts: 62

Hi guys...

I almost forgot about this place. But anyway I need some advice on a Mac IIci I just recently acquired. I got it several days ago and it worked fine. I got a bunch of peripherals, hds, zip, cdrom that came with it. All external SCSI. The system worked fine until I hooked up one of the external hard drives. Now I just get a flashing ? and it won't boot. I've tried booting it without any external SCSI devices but I still get a flashing ? symbol.

How do I get set back to boot off the internal SCSI hard drive?

Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2011 1:39 am

Is it possible one of the cables got knocked loose? I'm not too familiar with Macs, so I'm not sure I can be any more help than Google.

Joined: 10 May 2008 Posts: 62

Thanks for the reply. The cabling is okay.
I think I figured out what the problem was.

Apparently I was using a "broken" copy of Apple HD SC setup on the System 7.6.1 retail cd. Fortunately, I found a copy of the System 7.5.3 Disk tools which has a patched copy of the Apple HD SC Setup v7.3.5. I have it initializing an old internal scsi drive now. If this turns out, I will try it with the original oem scsi drive and then try installing my System 7.6.1 cd from there.

Joined: 10 May 2008 Posts: 62

Update...

I still couldn't get the internal drive to work for some reason. The mac is not seeing it. This all started when I hooked up some external scsi devices. Maybe I just have a bad drive.

I'm formatting a 2GB external SCSI on the machine now and will install System 7.6.1

Joined: 01 Oct 2004 Posts: 169 Location: behind you!

I was going to post last night, but noticed your reply upon previewing it.

I fear that hdd is dead. Macs are rather good at booting off a drive, any drive, so long as it powers up. I think you just had bad timing and it was just pure chance your devices were connected at the time of the failure.

Joined: 10 May 2008 Posts: 62

harshbarj wrote:

I was going to post last night, but noticed your reply upon previewing it.

I fear that hdd is dead. Macs are rather good at booting off a drive, any drive, so long as it powers up. I think you just had bad timing and it was just pure chance your devices were connected at the time of the failure.

Thats what I thought. But since I have a number of external harddrives. I decided to take the one I was using on the same machine out of the external enclosure and put it inside the machine. Sadly, the drive that did work in the enclosure would not work in the IIci. Apparently the internal SCSI bus was somehow fried. So I cannibalized the system for parts. I saved the hard disk, floppy drive, and all the RAM. The system wasn't really worth that much anyway. It had a few nice features like a L2 cache card and a Nubus Ethernet card. I saved those too.

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

I will try to remember when i find the small scsi drive
that you may still be interestedm, despite turning that pc into a "screw and jumper" donor
we do that to a lot of machines, some MB get shipped to the mid-west..
and cases bring ten cents a pound.
I no longer have interest in the smaller drives yest I still have a short ton.,
anyone need smaller drives? just pay shipping
perfect for that 2-3-486.

Joined: 10 May 2008 Posts: 62

wdegroot wrote:

I will try to remember when i find the small scsi drive
that you may still be interestedm, despite turning that pc into a "screw and jumper" donor
we do that to a lot of machines, some MB get shipped to the mid-west..
and cases bring ten cents a pound.
I no longer have interest in the smaller drives yest I still have a short ton.,
anyone need smaller drives? just pay shipping
perfect for that 2-3-486.

Thanks Walter.

The machine became more than a screw and jumper donor. I used the 1.44MB drive in the Mac IIci and put it in a 3.5" disk enclosure for my Apple IIgs. Since the IIgs doesn't have a superdrive card in it, I'm still stuck with having to use the hard to find 800K Diskettes. The 30pin SIMMs from the Mac were salvaged. I plan on using them in a Briel 4MB GS card that I intend to purchase later on.

Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 261 Location: WisConSin

Possibly too obvious but when I had trouble with the flashing BS my HD wasn't toast, I just had to boot off a bootable Mac floppy then copy the system over then the HD worked alright.

If you partition the drive you can't just boot away on old systems (at least on 6 you couldn't) You needed a bootable floppy then you had to copy

Cheers
Ryan

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

woild IBM 720k floppies work as 800k floppies?

Joined: 10 May 2008 Posts: 62

wdegroot wrote:

woild IBM 720k floppies work as 800k floppies?

Yes. I have formatted IBM 720k diskettes on the Apple as 800k ProDOS diskettes without problems. As long as the diskettes are double sided double density it doesn't really matter what they are formatted. The Apple knows what to do with them. It just seems that the double density variety of 3.5" diskettes are becoming harder to find these days and the few vendors that still carry them charge a premium for them.