science@nems.dt.navy.mil (Mark Zimmermann) (02/12/90)
A couple of Mac problems have hit me at once, and I wonder if
anybody could advise me on possible solutions:
- on my Mac Plus, the internal floppy disk drive is confused --
it seems to think that there is a floppy in there when there isn't,
and vice versa.
Specifically, upon boot-up I can hear the internal floppy
drive spin, and an "X" appears eventually on the boot-up disk
icon in the center of the screen; if I put a floppy in
partway, the "X" goes out; a floppy put in all the way gets
ejected after a little while. Strangely enough, the Mac Plus
now refuses to boot from an attached SCSI hard disk if the
internal floppy drive is empty; if a disk is placed in the
internal drive before turning on power, then it boots just
fine from the attached hard disk, and the floppy never
appears on the desktop, but then every 10 seconds or so the
"This disk is unreadable -- eject or initialize" alert appears,
which tends to make working inconvenient to say the least ;-(...
* has anybody else ever experienced this kind of illegal state
for an 800kB floppy drive to get itself into?
* how much should a dealer charge to fix something like this
(presumably by installing a rebuilt floppy)?
* can I fix it myself? (Advice on where to get parts,
instructions, etc.?)
* can I disable the internal floppy, perhaps by removing a wire to
the logic board, and then run from the external SCSI hard disk only? (I
could hook into an appletalk network, but don't have appleshare;
perhaps I could back up to another machine via a shared folder trick?!)
The second problem was amusing in its origin, but is fixed now:
during a fit of stupidity, while I was doing some slow
background printing (from HyperCard on a Mac IIcx to a
LaserWriter IINT) I tried to use the Font/DA Mover to install
some new fonts in the System ... this resulted in an
interesting crash, after which I could no longer boot up on
the internal 80 MB hard disk. My fault, and reinstalling the
System seems to have fixed everything ;-) ....
Many thanks -- ^z -- science@nems.dt.navy.mil on Internet,
or [75066,2044] on CompuServe