Why is my Mac sad?

[VCSMaster]

Hello all. I just got back from a long road trip (~950 miles) purchasing a Macintosh Quadra 950 and several spare parts and other machines from a gentleman with the usernam 360alaska. The main machine I went to pick up was the 950.

Machine worked before we left, worked when we got there, survived the trip all the way back and booted and worked just fine for several hours on the desk. Totally reliable! Do some general cleanup, put it all back together, it works great for about 6 hours.
Seems it got a fresh install of Mac OS 7.6 at some point and never got messed with past that.

Decide the machine is reliable enough to integrate it into the rest of the setup, get it all hooked up under the desk in it's new home and have it playing CDs in the background for a few hours no problems at all. I decided at one point to open the extension manager, which caused the machine to hang (cursor still moved, CD still playing, but nothing else responding). Figured it was busy, let it sit for about 20 minutes only to come back to it still hanging and playing a CD. Turn key off and the machine is so hung up it won't even power off. Hit restart and it shuts down.

Turn machine back on in the morning to get a Sad Mac error. Chimes fine, gets to gray screen with cursor, hard disk access and then straight to sad mac. It is consistent, same error every time, nothing changes.

I was looking for a list of Sad Mac error codes, which I found several (slightly different and conflicting lists), including the one here. However, it's unhelpful because my error seems to be described as "Reserved for Macintosh Compatibility"


What does this mean? The code is 0000 000F 0000 0063 if that helps anyone. General consensus outside of the list is "reinstall OS" but it would be nice to have some confirmation that the machine is still alive past this.

 

[Patrick]

How i go about troubleshooting is try to hypotheses what is broken and then try to prove myself wrong. Based on your description of what happened when it locked up, and what happens when you start it, i wonder if something is wrong with the system folder.

try holding the shift key when turning on the computer. That disables extensions. If the computer boots, then you know that the computer, hardware is fine. But something is wrong with the extensions folder.
If the shift key doesn't help, you will need to boot off from another drive. a CDROM or floppy disk usually. If it boots, then you can be reasonably sure the hardware is fine. But something is wrong with the OS install.

Key here, if you can get the comptuer to boot using a different disk. then you can narrow the problem space. Is it hardware or software?
Assuming its software. thats relatively easy to fix.

* note: i'm not saying for sure just because you can get it to boot off a drive or with shift key something _ISN'T_ wrong with the hardware. hardware can be flacky after all.

p.s. i love that you traveled 950 miles to pick up a Quadra 950.

 

[VCSMaster]

Shift key was the first thing I tried. Absolutely nothing, just goes straight to sad mac at first disk access.

I burned a disc with Mac OS 8.1, holding "C" on boot brings me a sad mac with 0000 000F 0000 0001. Turned out the optical drive was not terminated properly. Wonder why it worked in Mac OS 7.6 with no issue. Got the termination problem fixed, it boots from the Mac OS 8.1 disc consistently, but it gets to the desktop and hangs. No drives appear on the desktop and while the cursor still moves, the system is totally hung to the point that turning the key off does not cause the machine to shut down.

It booted 8.1 the first time no problem. Used Disk First Aid, which told me that the disk "Appears OK". Mac OS 8.1 setup told me that there was no system folder present on the drive. Decided I would just format it. Before opening Disk Tools, I received a message saying "The disk Macintosh HD has errors." Back to Disk First Aid, it now says it has an error that DFA cannot repair. When I clicked exit, the computer hung and it will not get to the desktop since.

I think the disk (IBM 31080 Pegasus) is damaged in some way, it's spinning up but any access causes the machine to hang. Booting with it unplugged it seems to work fine. No configuration of jumpers on the disk changes anything. I tried with a second disk (Seagate ST34371N) and it boots fine and Disk Tools can see the drive, but I don't want to format it since it came out of my HP Vectra and has utilities for HP-UX and IEEE-488 on it that I haven't been able to back up yet.

Consensus then is that the disk is dead? I have a large collection of drives but basically nothing in the SCSI world. I get my kicks out of early ATA and MFM/RLL drives.

 

[Patrick]

I'm not sure what the consensus would be. But that seems like a reasonable assumption to me.

SCSI to SD adapters are very popular right now. You can try to get one of them. MacSD, BlueSCSI, or RaSCSI are a few. But i'm prolly missing a few. But if you are cool with SD cards as a hard drive for retro computers, thats something you may want to look into.

or i guess try to get original SCSI drive if you want something a bit more period accurate... Just to warn you that Apple's disk utility might be picky on the hard drive you pick. So if you have problems. you might need to try a 3rd party disk formatting utility. (if you go with spinning rust hard drive)

 

[VCSMaster]

I don't particularly like solid state solutions, especially in vintage machines. I'll probably just finally get to backing up that Seagate drive's contents and re-use it in this machine.

 

[VCSMaster]

Well it gets to the desktop now, but I can't get any further than that. Any thoughts? Cursor still moves but nothing does anything, it's totally deadlocked past that once it gets to desktop.

 

[VCSMaster]

Alright, I've got it figured out. Hopefully this will help someone else out there so I will write my steps down.

The disk is not dead! Attached to an IBM compatible, it's fine but shows up as unformatted. Disk formats with no new bad sectors on the PC side too. It was attached to an Adaptec 2500 series PCI SCSI controller under Windows 2000, if that matters. Windows has no issue at all with accessing the drive. Putting the drive back into the Macintosh after this - Any 68k Macintosh, for that matter, would cause it to sad mac on first access, when booting from CD-ROM, they sad mac when holding C no matter what. Booting from floppy or CD the system always hangs at the desktop.

Your mileage may vary on this - But what I did was unplug the drive and boot the system to the desktop. Once the machine was responding, I went into Disk Tools and used the "Rescan bus" option after plugging the disk in. Internal SCSI is NOT hot swappable, but the machine is useless otherwise so I figured it was worth a shot. Then I initialized the drive with the "Zero all data" option. This took an incredibly long time. Then I updated the disk's driver.
Now the machine boots no problem every time with the disk connected.

Here's my guess as to what happened: The disk's driver was corrupted, and when the Macintosh was looking for a bootable disk it was finding a "valid" bootable disk but executing invalid instructions from it. When not booting from it, Mac OS was doing a bus scan at the desktop to draw current disk drives, finding the disk and reading it's driver only to find the same invalid instructions causing the system to hang. This is why Windows was unaffected, the drivers were stored on another disk or in the SCSI controller's ROM BIOS. When formatting the drive under Windows, it seems like Windows does not overwrite the Macintosh device driver for some reason and thus the problem remained.

Anyways, the disk is totally saved and the machine is back in working order. Thanks for the help, I hope this advice helps someone else in the future.

 

[VCSMaster]

Oh, and curiously, it seems like more "Modern" Macintoshes, even just later 68k Macs, really do not like older SCSI drives. I have a large collection of mechanical disks, but few are SCSI. The Quadra 950 being discussed, a Performa 631CD, and a Centris 610 were all totally unable to access several older SCSI devices I own, even those which supposedly came out of other Macintoshes.

These drives include:
Rodime R03057S (Listed as "Unsupported")
External Rodime 20 PLUS (Listed as "Unsupported")
Miniscribe 8425S (Does not appear at all)
Quantum ProDrive 40S (Listed as "Unsupported")
Quantum ProDrive 80S (Listed as "Unsupported")

As well as some other SCSI disks I tried which did not work either:
Kalok Octagon KL-341 (Does not appear at all)
Seagate ST-4766N (Listed as "Unsupported" until I removed the terminators, which made the drive work for some reason)
Seagate ST-43400N (Does not appear at all)
Seagate ST-277N (Appeared but writing any data caused the machine to hang)
Seagate ST-296N (Appeared but writing any data caused the machine to hang)
External DataFrame XP30 (RLL-SCSI translator with a Microscience mechanism, listed as "Unsupported")

Also, the Quadra 950 does not support SCSI device IDs >7, with the Macintosh taking ID 7 on both busses. It does not support SCAM auto-config either. It has two SCSI busses but prior to Mac OS 8.1 they are "folded" into one bus internally, so every device on BOTH busses must have a unique ID. I am not sure if A/UX or Mac OS 9 with a 601 upgrade changes this. Mac OS 8.1 seems to distinctly show both busses but I have not tried deliberately creating a conflict yet.

 

[Patrick]

Fascinating. I wonder if you had access to a linux box. you could run something like

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/path/to/scsi/device

there might even be a specific offsets you could use to wipe out the specific part of the drive that holds the SCSI driver. Maybe there is something like this in windows one could use also. i'm not sure.....
Probably like hot swapping ADB. it prolly won't harm anything most of the time....

some thoughts on drives that do not work. I know that Apple's HD formating tools tend to be picky on which HDD it will format (and install SCSI drivers on). But there are patched versions of those tools you can find. Also 3rd party tools were popular also.

SCSI Tools - Macintosh Garden

Control panel to re-scan and (un)mount SCSI drives. See also: FWB CD-ROM Toolkit FWB Hard Disk Toolkit 1.x FWB Hard Disk Toolkit•PE 2.5.x FWB Hard Disk Tookit•PE 3.0.2 FWB Hard Disk Toolkit 4.5.2 LaCie Silverlining (German) LaCie Silverlining 5

macintoshgarden.org

i've used Lido myself and FWD was popular . I have no idea if that would help with the drives you were having trouble with. I think I often just assumed that if the drive wasn't working it was broken.

Although, if it was a drive that originally shipped with the mac then HD SC should be happy with it..
...

I guess i should try to find a SCSI controller for a PC and try it there before I declare a hard drive to be broken

 

[VCSMaster]

I thought that the patched software might fix the "Unsupported" devices, but it seems strange that several of the unsupported disks actually came out of other Apple products. The Miniscribe 8425S I tried even had an active, working install of Macintosh System 7.1 on it for my Macintosh SE, and the Rodime external disk was previously used with a Macintosh Plus before I wound up with it!

I imagine that Macintoshes certainly are pickier about drives than Windows machines. Windows 2000 doesn't seem to care what I throw at it, if it's a valid device it'll show me *something*.

I don't have any access to any Linux machines, no. Almost all of my equipment is Windows or MS-DOS. Not a lot of Macintosh stuff in there either. I want to find an HDI-30 to DB-25 adapter for my PowerBook G3 Kanga to make transferring to ZIP a bit easier. Or, I suppose I could just find a media bay ZIP drive for it.

 

[Patrick]

Parallel port zip maybe ? They actually made zip drives that could do both scsi and parallel. but you could just get the parallel one if you find one. Mac OS's 7+ can read FAT disks with software was called "pc exchange" or something. I think it came bundled by OS 8...

you could use a bootcd (or usb) to just boot into linux. I used this before when trying to delete an undeleteable folder on a NTFS disk. I think the folder was corrupted and had a tree that wrapped back in on itself. Windows refused to delete it. but Linux was able to `rm -rf` it.

there is prolly windows software that can do that kind of lowlevel stuff i just don't know about.

it seems strange that several of the unsupported disks actually came out of other Apple products.

yeah one could look up the "officially supported" drives. i'm sure it wasn't uncommon for people to upgrade their hard drives in macs. But what you listed sounds like hard drives that came with Macs. (in general). I remember lots of SEAGATE hard drives came shipped in macs.

I wonder if this generation of Hard drives just have a high failure rate at their current age ? Maybe the rubber inside is turning into goo and locking up the platters and / or heads. (unless they work fine on your MSDOS/WINDOWS computers?)

Or like you found in one, the scsi driver thats on the disk gets in such a bad state that you can't even re-install the driver.

i'm just spitballing. idk. My hard drives tend to either work or i pickup SD card solutions. I'm not sure i would be any good at trying to fix them.

 

[VCSMaster]

I have tons of ZIP drives! Parallel and SCSI external, I've got an internal SCSI one, and I have several ZIP100 and ZIP250 ATAPI internal drives as well. Almost all work! Just don't have any way to connect the external SCSI drive to my PowerBook G3 because the SCSI connector is HDI-30 and the ZIP drive has the DB-25 on the back. I need an adapter for the laptop.

PC Exchange shows up with System 7, yeah, and the Quadra 950 has it and it can read FAT media just fine, but it's also a 68040 @ 33MHz with 16MB of RAM, so decompressing BIN/HQX/SIT files on it is glacial in many cases. It's much faster to put the archives on a compact flash card, into the PCMCIA slot on the Kanga and extract them there to be sent on the ZIP drive back. At least, that's the plan if I can get the drive connected to it. A 250MHz G3 with 96MB RAM has a much better time extracting!

I have no interest in anything related to Linux of any kind. I don't have any software or hardware set out to use it with and I have no interest in learning how to use it for any purpose.

No, there's almost no rubber in almost all of these drives, and all of the drives I listed actually work just fine under Windows 2000. I didn't test any known bad drives.