Macintosh SE Won't Boot System 7

rjkucia

rjkucia

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Dec 21, 2021
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Hi all, I'm trying to boot System 7 from my Macintosh SE (800k). However, each time I try to, either from a system folder on the internal drive or off a premade image on my BlueSCSI, some sort of error appears. I've attached an assortment of the errors I've seen. I've tried System 7, 7.1, and 7.5.5 with similar results. In the best scenario, I was able to see the desktop building, at which point it crashed.

In addition to these errors, there were also several instances of freezing (such as no cursor movement in several minutes), automatic reboots with no error message displayed, and jumbled screen image with static-y sound.

System 6 has been working just fine, although a few games I've tried (such as Dark Castle) have crashed even though I think they should work on this machine.

Thanks in advance for any help!
 

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wottle

wottle

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Others will probably have a more definitive answer, but I'd suspect that you may have some bad memory. How many sticks of RAM are in there? Have you tried booting with a single stick?
 
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rjkucia

rjkucia

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RAM was my first guess based on how this sort of issue works on modern machines (random errors, freezing with garbled image/sound). There’s 4x1MB in there. What’s the minimum that will let System 7 boot? Also, does the SE need a certain number of sticks at once or can it do one at a time?

Kai - that’s interesting, I wouldn’t have considered something like that. Serial seems to work fine in System 6 using my modem emulator - how would you recommend testing that?

Edit - This may or may not be related, but on System 6 I can only get one or maybe two of my drives to show up from the BlueSCSI, even when I have several set up and working according to the BlueSCSI’s logs. But I’m still figuring out a lot of stuff there so that could be a separate issue entirely.
 
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rjkucia

rjkucia

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rikerjoe

rikerjoe

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I have a similar boot failure problem with one of my SE/30’s, which boots fine under 6.0.8 but hangs during boot with 7.1 and 7.5 with a hard disk that boots another SE/30 just fine. Interestingly the System 7.1 included on the Rominator II boots my problematic SE/30 just fine whether from the Rominator itself or if I copy the System suitcase to my boot disk. I’m going to check the serial connections per @Kai Robinson ’s comment this weekend to see if I spot a problem area. I’m curious, does anyone know what the Rominator II System folder is based on? Does it not test the serial port, for example?
 
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rjkucia

rjkucia

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Ron's Computer Videos said:
Is it possible that LIDO also has issues with the 800k SE?
Click to expand...
I've seen this mentioned before, as LIDO not working with the Mac Plus and only working with the SE FDHD and later. But... I have no idea what that means lol. LIDO is a way of formatting drives right? Since I was having the same issues when booting from a System 7 folder on my internal HD, I'm not sure that's the issue.

I looked in to the memory and it sounds like the SE needs two sticks in at once, and System 7 should at least boot on 2MB of RAM. 2MB will be tight, but I guess that should make it a better memory stress test, lol

Edit: In case that doesn't give me a good answer, does anyone have a disk image with some good diagnostic tools on it? Like a Memtest86... or I guess it'd be Memtest68k?
 
rjkucia

rjkucia

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Dec 21, 2021
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Update: I opened it up and, unfortunately, it's the early SE model that uses soldered resistors to set the RAM amount (not jumpers). I don't really want to so a bunch of soldering right now, but I tried swapping around the RAM sticks to see if that did anything.

It didn't really seem to do much. Before opening up the computer, I tried a pre-test of System 7 and I actually was able to get to the desktop and play around a bit, but it crashed when I tried to run SimCity. The same thing happened after swapping the sticks around. I'm not sure which slots are "high" or "low" memory, I was hoping to move the bad stick either lower or higher in the address space to maybe change the frequency of it getting hit, but no dice.

Since I was able to get to the desktop/Finder, it doesn't sound like the serial issue @Kai was talking about. It sounded like that was a check that happens during boot.

Any recommendations on a memory tester or a place to get some known good memory that I could try?
 
rjkucia

rjkucia

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Dec 21, 2021
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Thanks, turns out they're really easy to come by so I just ordered some on eBay. Only ordered 2 since I imagine it would be pretty unlucky for 3+ of the sticks to be the culprit, lol
 
rjkucia

rjkucia

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Dec 21, 2021
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I've replaced the memory, and I *think* that's helped things, but things are still weird. I was able to fully boot System 7 pretty consistently, even 7.5, along with playing some games that wouldn't run before. However, there's still a few instances of crashing, and oftentimes when I reboot, the image becomes unusable - sometimes I get to "Welcome to Macintosh", where it will then loop or blink, or sad Mac errors, or "Address Errors" or "Coprocessor not detected" errors. I also had several files that errored out when I copied a bunch of files from one BlueSCSI image to another. Additionally, depending on my configuration of BlueSCSI images, not all of the drives will show up on the desktop, even though the log says the devices were found, and utilities can usually see there's something on that SCSI ID (just not mounted).

This makes me think there might be some SCSI issues as well.

What's a good way of testing that? Are there other things I should be looking at? Could it be an issue with the BlueSCSI itself? Does anyone have a "known good" image that basically just has System 6 and whatever utilities would be good for testing this? Thanks!

Edit: Some other things - the errors tend to persist more with a soft-reboot vs cutting power and waiting a bit. I also tried the BlueSCSI on both the external and the internal SCSI port. Another common error message I've been seeing is "Stack Collision with Heap"
 
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rikerjoe

rikerjoe

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I’ll share my recently-successful adventure on the same problem, @rjkucia. Perhaps this will help.

I have an SE/30 that boots fine under 6.0.8 and the 7.1 installed on the Rominator II. However, it hangs during the boot process with 7.1.1 and 7.5.3 drives installed on a BlueSCSI that work just fine on another SE/30. @Kai Robinson commented earlier in this thread about checking the serial side of things, which I did by building a serial loop back plug that @Branchus showed in another thread, and testing the ports via Snooper 2.0. Sure enough, Snooper would hang during the handshake test on both the printer and modem ports. I started ringing traces working backwards from the serial ports, and found three broken traces around and under the 8530 serial controller chip at UG12. After repairing the broken traces, my SE/30 now boots just fine under 7.1.1 and 7.5.3. My recommendation is to check UG12 for any broken connections. Note that pins 35 and 36 connect to ground, which is not shown on the schematics. UG12 is next to the C8/C9/C10 cluster by the power connector.

Good luck!
 
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rjkucia

rjkucia

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Thanks! That sounds like a quick and easy thing to check. Do you have a resource that shows the pin/connection labels/numbers? I can't seem to find a good schematic online for it. And I assume a simple continuity check with a multimeter should be sufficient, right?
 
rjkucia

rjkucia

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Dec 21, 2021
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Oooh, I reread it now and now I see what you mean - I had swapped 8530 (RS422) with 5380 (SCSI) in my head, haha. I had checked that site before but it's less complete for the SE. Fortunately as far as I can tell the SE & SE/30 have the same setup for serial, seems easy enough to follow.

By the way, I have been able to use the serial ports for my WiFi modem - if the traces were broken, wouldn't that not work? I'm not sure if I tried both ports, so I can try that and double check.

I should also note that since replacing the RAM, I've still been having applications crash when they've been loaded or copied from the BlueSCSI, even while running System 6. Conversely, I've gotten some utilities on a floppy disk, all of which run perfectly. Should I check the SCSI traces or run some other sort of diagnostics there? Or maybe that points back to the PSU again? Or, honestly, after all this maybe the BlueSCSI itself is bad, lol
 
rikerjoe

rikerjoe

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The modem traces might be fine, but perhaps the printer port has problems? I’m outside my expertise here. i read your thread more closely and see you have an SE which don’t suffer from the same SMD cap goo problems that plague the SE/30s. Anyway I wanted to share my experience in case it gave you another clue. Good luck!
 
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