Macintosh can't enter system

H

Highsheep

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Aug 9, 2024
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Hi, it's me again.... For last post, I test the power supply carefully, and it finally works well. 5V and 12V both works well. The Macintosh SE DID work. Unfortunately, there's a floppy disk icon with question mark on it. I tried using external hard drive, internal hard drive and floppy disk. All of them can't work. First, I tried to make a floppy disk with system in it. I make 6.0.7 and 6.0.8 in it, with 800k floppy disk. But once I insert the disk, it soon come out and ❌ replaced the question mark. When the computer worked well, there was a 6.0.7 in internal drive, but now, it also doesn't work. For external drive, I also make 6.0.7, 6.0.8 and 6.0.9, all of them can work on emulator, but can't work on this Mac. I tried to find which chip is broken, but it seems SCSI, floppy are two separate chip, I think it couldn't be broken at the same time, and the 5V and 12V also can be detected. What should I do???
 

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JDW

JDW

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If the machine won't boot, how did you make a real floppy disk?

I will assume for now that you have another vintage Mac which works, which you used to create a boot floppy. If that is the case, there still could be issues that prevent your SE from booting from that floppy. We don't know if the floppy you created has any issues. We don't know if the floppy drive in the non-booting SE has issues.

What I do to eliminate all those potential problems is use the FloppyEMU:

Floppy Emu Disk Emulator for Apple II, Macintosh, and Lisa | Big Mess o' Wires

www.bigmessowires.com www.bigmessowires.com

Yes, it is rather pricey. Yes, it will be costly to ship internationally. Yes, it will take time to arrive if you don't already have one. But it's a lifesaver. Every vintage Mac owner should have one of these. It comes with bootable disks already on its included SD card. You can set it up to book from a System 6.x floppy and if your SE boots from the FloppyEMU, then you know the problem you had with the real disk was either the disk was bad, or your SE's floppy drive has issues.

In other words, I am giving you advice on how to solve a problem when there are many unknowns. A FloppyEMU acts as both a known-good DRIVE and a known-good DISK. In fact, you can even use a FloppyEMU in "HD20 Mode" to boot from a 400MB or larger "virtual hard drive." It's as slow as a normal floppy drive, but you can pack it with lots of apps that can be used for diagnostic purposes. That is what I do.

So if you don't already have a FloppyEMU, I strongly would encourage you to buy one. I don't get kick-backs for suggesting that. It's simply an excellent tool to have. You can then use it with any vintage Mac that has a floppy drive connector, either internally or externally! That's right, you can remove the connector on it so it then leaves you with a ribbon cable connector that can attach to either of the SE's internal floppy drive connectors.
 
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