Pegasus Problem (LONG)

[scraft@trident.usacs.rutgers.edu (Steve Craft)]

Here's a letter I sent to Econ.  I was just wondering if any of the
SCSI gurus might be able to shed light on this:
___________________________________________________________________________
 
On Friday I got back my Pegasus that D. Proni worked on.  He or someone
installed a bare 220meg mechanism in my Pegasus housing and sent it back to
me.
 
I installed the drive this morning (Saturday 10jul93), and everything looked
great.  Without reading the "enclosed" letter in-depth, I copied it to a
floppy, copied the other shareware and freeware etc to floppies, and used the
Advanced DIsk Utility to re-partition the drive.  I made 8 partitions, all in
varying sizes.  I had a 7meg Pegasus system part, a 32meg Apps part, etc.
Everything worked great after I re-partitioned and formatted etc.
 
However, after partitioning the drive, I went to format, and it crashed.
No big deal I thought, it's just a 6.0.1 quirk.  So when I re-booted the
system just said I had to initialize each partition.  I did so and everything
was OK.
 
Now I started to get random crashes all over the place.  Copying from
partition to partition, from floppy to partition.  Running a program,
quitting a program and running another.  I could not once predict or
consistently repeat a crash sequence to track down a software problem.  Using
the 42meg drive I originally had, I would definitely know that if I ran a
beta soniqTracker program, and then tried to use AppleWorksGS, I would crash.
But the crashes I now got were completely random and "bloody"; ie while
still looking at the Finder screen, there was monitor text and constant ^G
beeping (I could tell when I rebooted and there was a short
text-screen flash).
 
Figuring System 6.0.1 was the problem, I got my original Pegasus 42meg and
put it in an external housing.  I put an external terminator on the external
drive, and connected the othr connector to the other Pegasus connector.  I
turned the external hd and then computer on, everything booted normally.  I
then copied the older and completely working System 6.0 from the 42meg
mechanism to the 220meg mechanism.  The computer crashed several times during
copies, but eventually I got everything I wanted, including a working System
folder, onto the 220meg.
 
I turned everything off, then disconnected the 42meg external SCSI hard
drive.
 
I turned my GS on, waited a moment or two, and then got the "Check Startup
Device" and bouncing apple message.  I waited a while, did a cold boot, the
machine sat there and then said "SCSI BOOT ERROR" or somesuch.  So I tried
cold-booting several times to no avail.  Then I went to the control panel,
set my startup slot to 5, and booted my stock 6.0 System Master disk.  When I
cold booted, the whole machine sat there for a long moment, and then went to
read the floppy.  On the Finder desktop, there was only the System Disk icon
and the RAM5 icon.  Then an alert box came up saying the device in hd.001 or
whatever could not be read, would I like to initialize or eject?  I just
clicked eject, and then proceeded to do this 7 other times for my other
partitions.
 
In a serious panic, I re-booted the floppy System Disk and then stuck in
Universe Master.  It would not recognize any of my hard drive partions in any
way.  Believe me, I tried everything I could think of to get my partitions
recognized, but now it's as if I have no partitions.
 
I turned everything off and opened the GS case.  I turned DMA off on my Apple
HighSpeed SCSI card, left its SCSI ID at 7.  I changed my Pegasus SCSI ID to
5.  Rebooting with this configuration did not help.
 
I am at a serious loss to figure out what happened, since I did not do
anything special.  The multiple crashes happened whether I started with or
without INITs, with System 6.0.1 or 6.0, copying or running an Application.
And now I have nothing.  :(
 
I am typing this from my brother's //GS, as I cannot do anything at all with
my machine.
 
In the message left on-disk, Mr. Proni mentioned changing the termination
power and problems with a Apple HighSpeed SCSI card.  Are these the sources
of my problem?  I still have my 42meg mechanism, but am unsure if the changes
made to the Pegasus housing will destroy this drive.  I really need to get my
GS working!
 
By the way, my current hardware configuration is:
 
ROM01 //GS
Pegasus housing w/220meg mechanism with a higher powr rating, SCSI ID6.
slot1 "printer port"
slot2 "modem port"
slot3 "built-in text interface" but I actually have a TranWarpGS 7MHz 8kcache
slot4 "mouse port"
slot5 "smartport" (no RAMdisk online until I lost my Pegasus partitions)
slot6 "your card" PC-Transporter 768k
slot7 "your card" Apple HighSpeed SCSI with DMA on SCSI ID7
Sequential Systems 4meg RAM
3.5" attached to smartport
3.5" attached to PC-Transporter
 
Help!