hammen@csd4.milw.wisc.edu (Robert Joseph Hammen) (11/23/87)
Recently, several people have been posting messages about their Mac II hard drives "disappearing" after a crash or reboot. Here are some things to try to recover your hard disk: 1) Boot the Macintosh II from a System Tools floppy. Hold down the Command, Option, and Shift (and possibly Control?) keys while pulling down the Control Panel DA. You will get a message saying something like "Are you sure you want to zap PRAM?". Select yes. Then, attempt to reboot. 2) Boot with a utilities floppy. Run the HD SC Setup application (1.5 is the latest and most preferable) and re-install the SCSI driver on your hard disk. (do this with the "Update" function). Again, attempt to reboot. 3) Boot with the Utilities disk. Select the "Disk First Aid" application and use the "Set Startup" option in the Special menu of the Finder to make it the startup application. Reboot, and you should be in Disk First Aid. Open the hard disk volume, if you can. Before you click on "Start" to begin scavenging the disk, you might want to type Command-S - this will give you a more detailed explanation of what the program is doing. After DFA does its bit, you might wish to try to reboot again. Note that if the hard disk does show up in the Finder, and will not boot, despite any attempts to make it the "Startup Device" in the Control Panel, you might want to try throwing away the System file and replacing it with a virgin one. If you can't get the hard disk to mount, try to find a copy of Paul Mercer's SCSI Tools cdev (control panel file). It will scan the SCSI Bus for devices and will attempt to mount them. If you still can't recover the hard drive, consider purchasing MacZap. The MacZap Recover HFS application is good at recovering trashed disks that other programs can't touch. I got my copy for ~$35 from ComputerWare. ========================================================================= Robert Hammen Computer Applications, Inc. hammen@csd4.milw.wisc.edu Delphi: HAMMEN GEnie: R.Hammen CI$: 70701,2104
creech@unc.cs.unc.edu (Jeff Creech) (11/24/87)
In article <3611@uwmcsd1.UUCP> hammen@csd4.milw.wisc.edu.UUCP (Robert Hammen) writes: >Recently, several people have been posting messages about their Mac II hard >drives "disappearing" after a crash or reboot. Here are some things to try to >recover your hard disk: > >1) Boot the Macintosh II from a System Tools floppy. Hold down the Command, I really appreciate all the replies of "you're doing the right thing just use the system tools disk to reinstall the SCSI driver." I want to *why* it is that some of the Mac II's are losing their SCSI drivers several times a week. This not what we are paid five grand for! Does Apple have an *answer* to this problem? This is really getting annoying. (nothing personal Robert.) Jeff Creech Macintosh Systems Specialist Computer Services UNC-CH Dept. of Computer Science
tecot@apple.UUCP (Ed Tecot) (11/30/87)
In article <2167@unc.cs.unc.edu> creech@unc.UUCP (Jeff Creech) writes: >I want to *why* it is that some of the Mac II's are losing their SCSI drivers >several times a week. This not what we are paid five grand for! > >Does Apple have an *answer* to this problem? Here is my assessment: When an application crashes, it may end up executing random memory. We have determined that a particular trap, SetOSDefault, has a high probability of being executed when an application goes astray. This trap will cause your startup disk to attempt to boot from a different (nonexeistent) partition. The fix is to reset your parameter RAM, as far as I know, the SCSI driver is not touched. We have a fix for this problem (although it would be nice if applications didn't have these bugs). To determine if you are hitting this, the next time your hard disk refuses to boot, boot off of a floppy, and open the control panel with command-option-shift depressed to reset the parameter RAM. Then attempt to reboot. If this fails, tell me. If this succeeds, post the programs, DAs, INITs, etc. that you use, so that we have some hope of finding the culprit. _emt