Mac Classic I ROM Boot w/ BlueSCSI Issue [Resolved]

[AndyDiags]

Hi All,
When I boot my Mac Classic I from ROM (Command-Option-X-O) while my BlueSCSI is plugged in, the system locks up once it reaches to the desktop.
Does anyone else have this issue?

As shown in the screenshot, the system gets to the home screen, and the cursor changes to the clock wait pointer indefinitely. I can move the mouse, but unable to click anything.

This issue does not occur when BlueSCSI is not plugged in. I'd like to know if there is a hardware problem with my system, or this is expected. Perhaps the OS can't detect external SCSI HDs. Can someone please test this setup?

I'm using a BlueSCSI v1 w/ MacPack installed. The ROM on this Classic has "Finder 6.1x" and "System 6.0.3".

When I do boot from the BlueSCSI, it seems to run a bit slower than expected at times, which makes me question whether there is a HW issue on this machine.

Booting from ROM with a real internal hard drive has no issues .

 

[Yoda]

I don't think it's related to your case, but I had no end of problems with a BlueSCSI v1 and my Classic. The system boots perfectly with it hanging out the back, but locks up during boot with it mounted above the floppy drive as normal. I gave up and put a 40Mb HD in instead since this was totally repeatable.

However, during the testing, I did exactly what you have tried, booting from the ROM, which of course works every time, including with the BlueSCSI hanging out the back, but locks up every time with the BlueSCSI mounted, or even just resting, above the floppy.

The same microSD card in an external BlueSCSI boots the system every time, and also mounts with the system booting from ROM.

Tried the BlueSCSI in my Classic II and it works perfectly. I just put it down to my Classic being cursed.

 

[AndyDiags]

I was able to figure it out.

The main culprit was that I recently replaced my 16GB SD card with a 4GB SD card, but I never formatted the new SD card from FAT32 to ExFat. This prevented the drive from appearing when booting from ROM. It also caused the slow downs when booting from BlueSCSI.

Another thing that threw me off and gave me issues is a new version of MacPack on Archive.org, (MacPack-20240226). This version has problems. When I boot from ROM or floppy disk while this image is in the BlueSCSI, the desktop will indefinitely lock up. There's a version that was released one week earlier (MacPack-20240219). The version works with no issues when booting from ROM or floppy.

One interesting thing I noticed is that, while booting from ROM or floppy, if I reboot/shutdown from the menu, next time I boot up to the ROM/floppy the external BlueSCSI image appears right away on the desktop. If I do an unsafe reboot by just flipping the power switch on the back, the next time I boot from ROM or floppy the system locks up for 60 seconds, after which the BlueSCSI image will appear on the desktop. Seems that the Mac does some extra file validation if the Mac reboots unexpectatly.

My BlueSCSI is still on v1.1-20211215, while the currently release is v1.1-20231116, I'll need to update it as there's been lots of changes since.

 

[Yoda]

Thanks for posting the followup - I had forgotten two things that could be important, the first being that not all microSD cards are created equal, so that I ought to experiment a bit with a few different ones, and that secondly, the v1 BlueSCSI can work with ExFAT as well as FAT32. I haven't tried that - and the documentation isn't on @Androda 's site now v2 is current. I should have remembered that, but didn't.

I do think my Classic is cursed though!

 

[eric]

Glad you got it resolved! I was going to pull down my classic but glad I can leave it on the shelf.

That MacPack is a bit mysterious - I'm not sure what driver it uses and It might have those Mac Plus SCSI speed extensions. Something on my TODO list to dig into.

My BlueSCSI is still on v1.1-20211215, while the currently release is v1.1-20231116, I'll need to update it as there's been lots of changes since.

Yes, you should! There is a ton of goodies (CD, Toolbox, etc) - update!

and the documentation isn't on @Androda 's site now v2 is current.

All docs are on the project wiki vs individual sellers pages. Here's v1's: https://github.com/erichelgeson/BlueSCSI/wiki/

 

[Yoda]

All docs are on the project wiki vs individual sellers pages. Here's v1's: https://github.com/erichelgeson/BlueSCSI/wiki/

Oh brilliant! You get a gold star for that! It's not always clear what differences there are between various sources of BlueSCSI, but that does ecourage me to dig out the Classic and do some experimentation. I know the BlueSCSI itself is good.

 

[eric]

Getting a bit off topic but if you'd DM me any where you think the docs could be less confusing I'd appreciate it.

 

[Branchus]

I was able to figure it out.

The main culprit was that I recently replaced my 16GB SD card with a 4GB SD card, but I never formatted the new SD card from FAT32 to ExFat. This prevented the drive from appearing when booting from ROM. It also caused the slow downs when booting from BlueSCSI.

Another thing that threw me off and gave me issues is a new version of MacPack on Archive.org, (MacPack-20240226). This version has problems. When I boot from ROM or floppy disk while this image is in the BlueSCSI, the desktop will indefinitely lock up. There's a version that was released one week earlier (MacPack-20240219). The version works with no issues when booting from ROM or floppy.

One interesting thing I noticed is that, while booting from ROM or floppy, if I reboot/shutdown from the menu, next time I boot up to the ROM/floppy the external BlueSCSI image appears right away on the desktop. If I do an unsafe reboot by just flipping the power switch on the back, the next time I boot from ROM or floppy the system locks up for 60 seconds, after which the BlueSCSI image will appear on the desktop. Seems that the Mac does some extra file validation if the Mac reboots unexpectatly.

My BlueSCSI is still on v1.1-20211215, while the currently release is v1.1-20231116, I'll need to update it as there's been lots of changes since.

I suspect that if you'd left the computer long enough it would have eventually mounted. Was the activity light illuminated while it was stuck in this state? If so, I think it was probably rebuilding the desktop on your BlueSCSI drive, but it was performing very slowly because of the card format.

Later versions of the OS display a window letting you know that the desktop is being rebuilt, but the old System 6 just brings up the clock face. Keep in mind that in those days, drives were 40MB, not 2GB, so rebuilding the desktop was a lot quicker.

 

[Yoda]

Getting a bit off topic but if you'd DM me any where you think the docs could be less confusing I'd appreciate it.

This is my error, not your documentation. I mistakenly assumed that I needed @Androda 's documentation since that's what I used to get it up and running, and the BlueSCSI was his version. It never occurred to me that your documentation was the same. My bad, not yours.