Re: Repost: can't get hard drive to boot GS/OS

[pbauer@athena.mit.edu (Paul H Bauer)]

philip@labtam.labtam.oz.au (Philip Stephens) writes:
> Paul H Bauer)writes:
>
> >I just went thru the same exercise with two Quantum drives and had to
reforma
\
> t
> >both drives to get them to be able to boot. It appears that the boot
blocks
> >were damaged but salvation virus md and zeroing the partition would not
fix
> >the problem. A hard low level format and rebuilding the drives finally
worked
,
> >about three days of effort. I was able to salvage all of my files off the
> >drives but could not boot from them.
>
>   A quick update on my attempt to get my hard drive to boot GS/OS (yeah,
> I'm the original poster): using Advanced Apple Utilities to reformat,
> repartition and zero the blocks seemed to do the trick, along with ensuring
> I had the right SCSI drivers.  But get this: all it took to make the drive
> unbootable once more was for another program to crash into the monitor!
> The program had been run from the ORCA shell, the shell started from the
> Finder.  When I rebooted the computer, the Finder crashed!  If this is
what's
> gonna happen everytime a program fails to run correctly, I might as well
give
> up...
 
what scsi controller are you using?
it sounds like either:
 
a.  the scsi controller is bad (possibly the scsi chip)
b.  you have a cabling problem (termination, loose wires)
c.  there is no c.
 
just a few tips from someone who's been there before....
 
  seth ---> thes+@cmu.edu

A follow up from pbauer:
	When I had the problem on the two Quantum drives Salvation gave me an 
indication that the boot blocks were damaged. This also was indicated after 
the low level format so I'm not sure of the diagnosis.

	The last couple of days I was having trouble starting the system
and had to start several times before everything worked properly, even
with the da's and inits off. Tonight I took out a 3 foot length of SCSI
cable that was between the drive and the termination resisters, (easier to
connect a second drive for archieving), and the system booted first time with
no errors. I am using an apple HS DMA SCSI card and the 9 mhz Zip. This
makes me wonder if the apple card is very sensitive to cable length. There 
were no problems when I had the second Quantum drive at the end of that
same cable with internal resister termination.

pbauer@mit.edu