brian@maui.cs.ucla.edu (Brian Tung) (06/06/91)
A friend of mine has a Mac SE which has been misbehaving for the last few
days. The symptom: after booting, everything is fine until the desktop
comes up, and then the following sign appears.
This disk [pointing to an external floppy drive] cannot be read.
Do you want to initialize?
EJECT [default] INITIALIZE
If you select INITIALIZE, it tries and fails. If you select EJECT, the
sign disappears for about two seconds, then reappears and irritates
continually until our patience is exhausted, and we shut the machine off.
OR, we can open something like the Norton Utilities, or the SCSI Probe,
and (even without running anything) after closing it, the problem goes
away. Furthermore, the SCSI Probe, if we do run it, does not indicate
the existence of any external floppy drive (so it seems the problem has
been removed by that point).
Now, the questions: what is going on here? Why does it think there is a
third floppy drive (there are two mounted internally), and why does it
suddenly realize that it's mistaken once Norton et al are opened? When
we restart the machine, the problem comes back. Why does it become wrong
again? Setting the startup disk to the hard disk doesn't help either.
Help please. Thanks in advance.
Brian Tung (brian@maui.cs.ucla.edu)fprefect@caen.engin.umich.edu (Matt Slot) (06/07/91)
I've found that if you have an empty drive that thinks it has a disk in it, Cmd-Shift-1 or C-S-2 takes care of it. C-S-0 (Zero) is supposed to work on a third drive. I had to do this earlier this morning and it worked fine. fprefect@caen.engin.umich.edu Matt Slot, CAEN Mac_Support