fiatlux@ucscc.UCSC.EDU.ucsc.edu (David Vangerov) (11/17/87)
I don't remember the article specifically, and I don't feel like looking back for it, but someone had a problem when they set their ram cache to 750K and then couldn't undo. Well, along the way to undoing this, his hard drive suddenly disapeared from his Mac II, and he had to reformat it. Well, this happened to the one we had a at work (and another one with the same problem came into the shop a while ago) and I managed to restore the drive without having to reformat it and such. What happens is that some application that you were running has managed to die and you were forced to reboot. Instead of getting a happy mac and the mac rebooting in less than 7 seconds (WOW!, what speed!), you get an icon asking you to insert disk. I don't know how the Mac manages to forget about it's internal hard drive, but it happens (and damn annoying when it does). Anyways, this happened to me, I was very panicked and wonder if I had trashed the disk somehow (I was attempting to restore someones crashed disk and must've done something to the hard disk by accident). Anyways, it's not there, I know that it is. Solution, not reformatting it. All I had to do was get out my systems tool disk, boot up with it, and then run the hard disk installer (HDSC setup 1.4, I believe), it managed to find the drive, I simply ran a test of the disk and updated the driver (the second time it happened we just updated the driver) and after that, the disk came back and things work just fine now. A lot easier than having to reformat the disk and then restore from backup (assuming that you are a responsible user and backup your hardisk every week). Reformatting the drive won't help restore the control panel settings to "factory mode" because the settings of the control panel (and the other CDEV's, if I'm not mistaken) is kept in a special part of memory that stays there even with the power off. Someone called it the PRAM. I haven't dared try this with our mac II yet, thought it would seem that all you have to do is remove the battery for a second and then pop it back in if Command-Shift-Option-Whatever doesn't do it for you. Of course the battery on a Mac II is a little harder to get to than on a standard Mac 512/Plus. +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | David Vangerov | | Just your average Theater Arts major with a weird thing for computers | | fiatlux@ucscc.BITNET || fiatlux@ucscc.ucsc.EDU || ...!ucbvax!ucscc!fiatlux | +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
emuroga@uiucdcsb.UUCP (11/19/87)
The CMS drives come with a utility called ZapPRAM, which resets the PRAM. I've had to use this a couple of times. You just boot up with a floppy, and run ZapPRAM, and then restart. Everything is back to normal. Eisuke Muroga University of Illinois ARPA emuroga@b.cs.uiuc.edu CSNET emuroga@uiuc.csnet USENET uiucdcsb!emuroga
creech@unc.cs.unc.edu (Jeff Creech) (11/19/87)
In article <1155@saturn.ucsc.edu> fiatlux@ucscc.UCSC.EDU (David Vangerov) writes: >What happens is that some application that you were running has >managed to die and you were forced to reboot. Instead of getting >a happy mac and the mac rebooting in less than 7 seconds (WOW!, >what speed!), you get an icon asking you to insert disk. I don't >know how the Mac manages to forget about it's internal hard >drive, but it happens (and damn annoying when it does). Anyways, I've had the same problem on 4 of our 5 new Mac II's with 80 Meg drives. (I know I'm a pretty lucky guy.) I can't get the problem to happen on any of our older II's, and have not been able to isolate the application(s) that are causing the problem. I remember seeing some message about outdated ROMs on the hard disk itself, and I assume that the II's I have have the new ROMs (with slot manager fixed). Those are my only leads towards a solution. Who else is seeing this? Maybe Apple can comment if they've seen this problem. I'm carring a utilities disk around in my pocket at all times. Thanks for all responses! Jeff Creech Macintosh Systems Specialist Computer Services UNC-CH Dept. of Computer Science
gamble@sfu_charon.cs.sfu (11/20/87)
Holding down command-option-shift while selecting the control panel from the Apple menu will reset the PRAM to factory settings, for god sakes don't remove the batteries. /---VLSI Lab / ...uw-beaver!ubc-vision!fornax!sfu_yoda!gamble \ \ \ / \ \ \__________________ \ \ \___Simon Fraser University \ \ \ \___University of British Columbia \ \___University of Washington
geb@cadre.UUCP (11/21/87)
I've had this happen too, on the 40MB internal that came with the Mac II disappears once in a while. Running the update program puts it back, but it is annoying. I have switched the boot-up to the Jasmine disk because of this, and had no more trouble.
spector@suvax1.UUCP (Mitchell Spector) (11/22/87)
In article <2115@unc.cs.unc.edu>, creech@unc.cs.unc.edu (Jeff Creech) writes: > In article <1155@saturn.ucsc.edu> fiatlux@ucscc.UCSC.EDU (David Vangerov) writes: > >... some application... has managed to die and you were forced to reboot. > >Instead of... a happy mac... you get an icon asking you to insert disk. > >I don't know how the Mac manages to forget about it's internal hard > >drive, but it happens (and damn annoying when it does). Anyways, > > I've had the same problem on 4 of our 5 new Mac II's with 80 Meg drives. > ... > Who else is seeing this? Maybe Apple can comment if they've seen this > problem. I'm carring a utilities disk around in my pocket at all times. > > Jeff Creech > Macintosh Systems Specialist > Computer Services > UNC-CH Dept. of Computer Science We've seen the same problem on two of our Mac II's. Both have 2M of RAM, a 40M internal hard disk drive, and a monochrome monitor. In both cases, re-installing the driver solved the problem (without any loss of data). One incident occurred after running uw, the Unix-window terminal emulator; I believe the other happened when running one of the public-domain font editors, but I'm not sure. I will not run any program which causes random crashes of this nature again, at least until the cause is explained and I am convinced that no harm to user data on the hard disk can result. Perhaps the worst aspect of this is that it is easy to imagine somebody re-initializing the hard disk unnecessarily (taking the time to restore from backups and losing everything created or modified since the last backup). -- Mitchell Spector |"Give me a Dept. of Computer Science & Software Eng., Seattle Univ.| ticket to Path: ...!uw-beaver!uw-entropy!dataio!suvax1!spector | Mars!!" or: dataio!suvax1!spector@entropy.ms.washington.edu | -- Zippy the Pinhead
mckenzie@husc2.UUCP (mckenzie) (11/23/87)
In article <1155@saturn.ucsc.edu> fiatlux@ucscc.UCSC.EDU (David Vangerov) writes: >Someone called it the PRAM. I haven't dared try this with our mac >II yet, thought it would seem that all you have to do is remove >the battery for a second and then pop it back in if >Command-Shift-Option-Whatever doesn't do it for you. Of course >the battery on a Mac II is a little harder to get to than on a >standard Mac 512/Plus. This is somewhat of an understatement - the MacII battery is not only hard to get at, it is actually soldered to the system board! Messing with it is guaranteed to void your warranty, and might ruin your system board to boot. Opening the control panel while holding down every available modifier key really does work - I promise. (See also various messages from Apple staffers to this effect.) David McKenzie mckenzie@husc2.UUCP