BlueSCSI stopped working

[nobodydontknow]

I have a BlueSCSI v2 connected to my Mac Plus, using the MacPack image. It's been working fine, but today it stopped, and I think it's an issue with the BlueSCSI itself.

I've tried powering the BlueSCSI standalone, not connected to the Mac, as well as connected.

On boot, it does read the SD card, and I've confirmed it's writing a new log.txt. But the blue LED blinks twice, the white power LED blinks once, then shuts off. So it seems like the BlueSCSI is not staying on.

 

[Mu0n]

Hey there,

I've used BlueSCSI on a Mac Plus for a little more than a year, both v1 and v2 succesfully.

I suggest you seek help directly in the BlueSCSI discord (here's an invite that will expire in a week from this post's timestamp: https://discord.gg/JSuAPGAh ) , and find the corresponding BlueSCSI v2 suport section.

I can tell you right away that I'm not a fan of bloaty 2 GB images inside a Mac Plus. If your machine crashes during a disk write operation, you can corrupt your volume. That problem has been known and been worked upon, but I'm not solid on its exact progress.
My best advice is to keep a lean OS equipped drive image, possible another lean-ish or medium sized 'sandbox' drive where your stuff lives, and use that MacPack 2 GB images only for reading purposes (lock it? unmount it when unused?) to transfer stuff into the others.

 

[nobodydontknow]

Thanks, I'll post on the BlueSCSI discord, thanks for the invite!
And thanks for the advice on drive images. I was actually working on creating a clean image when this started happening.

 

[eric]

Give the steps here at the top a complete run through - usually takes care of 99% of issues https://github.com/BlueSCSI/BlueSCSI-v2/wiki/Troubleshooting

I assume you have the correct bluescsi.ini settings since you were previously booted but just to be sure you can go to ini.bluescsi.com and click mac plus to validate.

 

[nobodydontknow]

Yes, I ran into that issue earlier, so I now have the correct bluescsi.ini and it was working fine. Pretty sure it's a hardware issue with the BlueSCSI.

 

[Androda]

This issue was discussed in Discord.

Turns out that the BlueSCSI unit was accidentally partially plugged into the Floppy Drive port. Floppy drive ports provide a variety of voltages which are hazardous to BlueSCSI, such as 12v. It was probably damaged by the over-voltage. I'm going to take a look and see if replacing some parts will repair the unit.

 

[Androda]

For the curious, the attached picture shows the damage to the transceiver chips (likely caused by 12v from the floppy port). I swapped out all the chips excluding the activity LED driver (this is more isolated, running from 3.3 via pico) and now it's working again. The pico itself is making a clicking sound from time to time, so I don't know how long it'll last. Probably the 3.3v buck regulator took a hit, it's only designed to operate up to 6v input.