Macintosh SE Won't Boot System 7

[rjkucia]

Are the two serial ports *supposed* to behave the same? It looks like they're wired slightly differently, although I'm not sure what all the chips they pass through do.

Anyways, since I'm still having issues under both 6.0.8 and 7.0.1, it sounds like the serial port is probably not the issue, even if one is broken. All of the crashes seem to happen while either running an OS off the BlueSCSI or running a program off it, or running one that was copied from it. I don't have issues with programs run of floppies or the internal HDD (unless it's something that was copied from the BlueSCSI).

There have also been a few other weird issues when using the BlueSCSI. For example, usually only about half the SCSI devices mount automatically. Even when just 1 drive image is on the BlueSCSI, it seems to "override" my internal drive and I can only boot from floppy or a BlueSCSI image. I thought maybe it was a SCSI ID issue, but the behavior is the same no matter what IDs I use. Once I'm booted, I can mount all the drives manually in LIDO and it seems to work fine then. Not sure how normal this is, though - it sounds like SCSI overall can be very finnicky.

How useful might a drive utility like Apple HD SC Setup be here? I've tried it a few times and got an error saying it couldn't write to the drive, but I don't think that was the "patched" version. I have that version on floppy so I can try that later today.

 

[Kai Robinson]

Check continuity of the R/C network?

 

[rjkucia]

Check continuity of the R/C network?

Do you know of a guide I could follow for that, or some other resource? I tested a bit of it, but it's pretty complicated haha.

 

[Kai Robinson]

well other than the corner pins, everything is a straight through connection from one side to the other - you should get continuity across the network.

 

[rjkucia]

well other than the corner pins, everything is a straight through connection from one side to the other - you should get continuity across the network.

Could you elaborate on that? Like with the serial ports, should pin X on port 1 go straight through to pin Y on the 8530? If that's the case, I just don't know which pins should be connected.

 

[Kai Robinson]

Okay - these yellow things at the back of the board, are the R/C Networks. Test the pins opposite each other, from top to bottom - ignoring the corner pins.

You can see where the traces run to the serial ports, check you have continuity ACROSS the R/C network and also check if the pin at the connector reaches all the way to where they go to on the other side of the R/C network.

 

[rjkucia]

I ran some LIDO tests, and here's what I'm getting on the BlueSCSI. The tests run fine on the internal HDD.

 

[rjkucia]

As another update - I've tried a few more things, like testing the 5V line on the PSU (which looks totally fine), and I'm leaning toward the BlueSCSI being the issue. I've ordered a RaSCSI to see if that works. Hopefully that lets me figure out either way where the issue lies.

 

[rjkucia]

To close out this thread - the RaSCSI came in, and while using it, all my issues went away. I can use images, move files, and even boot System 7.5.5 without any crashes or other problems. The BlueSCSI is most likely bad. I'll probably have a follow up thread in the future when I'm motivated to work on that, but for now I'm happy that I have a solution that works (and that the SE itself seems fine)!

 

[nottomhanks]

Where can one get a full RaSCSI from?

 

[rjkucia]

I got mine from SamplerZone - https://samplerzone.com/products/chicken-rascsi-sd-scsi-drive

Definitely recommend them, especially if you don't already have a Pi. Their focus is on vintage samplers, but I told them mine was for a Mac and they put some images of System 6 on there. It's a Pi Zero 2 W, which means it's fairly low powered, but it works great as a single-purpose device. It's a good deal too, cheaper than buying all those parts separately.

 

[Mu0n]

It seems like the premade images from Mac garden don't play nice with Mac Plusea, tons of people report this. I also had problems avoiding a mouse location freeze problem (the click still works but I can't move it) which appears after a few minutes of normal operations!

Perhaps the same happens for the SE. There's apparently a working 1 Gb image file that works for a Plus, I've read Kay Koba offer it on a Facebook group.

 

[rjkucia]

It seems like the premade images from Mac garden don't play nice with Mac Plusea, tons of people report this. I also had problems avoiding a mouse location freeze problem (the click still works but I can't move it) which appears after a few minutes of normal operations!

Perhaps the same happens for the SE. There's apparently a working 1 Gb image file that works for a Plus, I've read Kay Koba offer it on a Facebook group.

Thanks, but it wasn't an issue with the images or the SE - the BlueSCSI is the culprit and I've had no issues with the RaSCSI

 

[Mu0n]

Thanks, but it wasn't an issue with the images or the SE - the BlueSCSI is the culprit and I've had no issues with the RaSCSI

Did you flash the firmware to the latest and greatest? It started working better with mine after I did that one 2 occasions.

I couldn't use the default simple flash program so I had to reupload the compiled project from Visual Studio using a project task ('upload').

 

[rjkucia]

I haven't tried that, thanks! I'll give that a go and see if that helps.