Even at home, I'm the tech support guy
You may have noticed that updates recently have been erratic; after the holidays I've been dealing with a lot of computer problems, including a dead monitor (well, two, really, but we're back up and running now), a wonky cordless mouse (fixed!), and the problem I'll describe here. This is really only for tech-heads, but it seemed a waste to write all this up and post it to a message board where it will be lost forever. I'll get back to less technical topics soon.
My original post to the Macfixit Forums:
I have a B&W G3/300 upgraded with an OWC G4/450 chip. On the original 6 GB hd there are 2 partitions, one for classic, one for OS X 10.1.
On an additional 80GB hard disk (the slave) I have installed Jaguar. When I boot up from this disk, it intermittently but regularly crashes on startup during the gray "wind" screen. (Every two out of three attempts, I'd say.) Sometimes the screen just freezes, sometimes I get a pattern of monochrome lines across the Apple logo.
I can boot with a "safe" boot (shift key on startup) without incident, and into single user mode no problem. I have run Diskwarrior 2.0 on all the drives, and I have repaired the permissions on the Jaguar drive. I have run fsck -y in single user mode, although I have yet to repair it "completely" ("This disk appears OK") in this fashion. Booting from the OS 9 drive and OS X.1 drive is no problem.
Any ideas on what's going on? Should I not have installed an OS on a slave drive? Your thoughts would be appreciated, and more info on my system is available if needed. Thanks.
One of the resident geeks there indicated that it was likely a hardware problem, and that I should pull various things out to see if there was a conflict. I trundled the Mac into work, where I have more room to work, and the following 2nd forum post resulted.
It seems I didn't know my own system as well as I thought -- six months after installing that 2nd drive I had forgotten the steps I'd gone through to get it there!
The 2nd drive is an 80GB ATA-100 drive, which, following the handy instructions at xlr8yourmac.com, I installed using a Sonnet ATA-100 PCI card.
Also installed in the PCI slots are:
- an old iX-TV video capture card (only works when booted from OS9, but I use it regularly)
- an Apple-installed SCSI card
- the Apple-installed video card
I tried removing the SCSI card, but that didn't result in a clean bootup from the 80GB Jaguar disk. Thinking it might be a problem with the Sonnet card, I pulled the ribbon cable from the Sonnet card and connected the 80GB Jaguar disk directly to the motherboard's IDE controller (disconnecting the 6GB disk first).
Guess what? The Jaguar disk booted immediately, without incident. (!)
I connected the 6GB disk to the Sonnet card. Not only did the Jaguar disk continue boot normally, but the 10.1.5 system boots fine when connected to the Sonnet card! So does the OS 9.2.1 system on a separate partition of the same 6GB disk. I re-installed the SCSI card (not that I use it anymore, but it's there) and all seems to be well.
My only misgiving is that now the ATA-100 drive is connected to an ATA-33 controller and probably won't be fast enough to capture digital video from my Firewire camcorder. I guess I can always buy a new ATA-100 drive to replace the 6 GB drive.
Thrilling stuff, huh?
My original post to the Macfixit Forums:
I have a B&W G3/300 upgraded with an OWC G4/450 chip. On the original 6 GB hd there are 2 partitions, one for classic, one for OS X 10.1.
On an additional 80GB hard disk (the slave) I have installed Jaguar. When I boot up from this disk, it intermittently but regularly crashes on startup during the gray "wind" screen. (Every two out of three attempts, I'd say.) Sometimes the screen just freezes, sometimes I get a pattern of monochrome lines across the Apple logo.
I can boot with a "safe" boot (shift key on startup) without incident, and into single user mode no problem. I have run Diskwarrior 2.0 on all the drives, and I have repaired the permissions on the Jaguar drive. I have run fsck -y in single user mode, although I have yet to repair it "completely" ("This disk appears OK") in this fashion. Booting from the OS 9 drive and OS X.1 drive is no problem.
Any ideas on what's going on? Should I not have installed an OS on a slave drive? Your thoughts would be appreciated, and more info on my system is available if needed. Thanks.
One of the resident geeks there indicated that it was likely a hardware problem, and that I should pull various things out to see if there was a conflict. I trundled the Mac into work, where I have more room to work, and the following 2nd forum post resulted.
It seems I didn't know my own system as well as I thought -- six months after installing that 2nd drive I had forgotten the steps I'd gone through to get it there!
The 2nd drive is an 80GB ATA-100 drive, which, following the handy instructions at xlr8yourmac.com, I installed using a Sonnet ATA-100 PCI card.
Also installed in the PCI slots are:
- an old iX-TV video capture card (only works when booted from OS9, but I use it regularly)
- an Apple-installed SCSI card
- the Apple-installed video card
I tried removing the SCSI card, but that didn't result in a clean bootup from the 80GB Jaguar disk. Thinking it might be a problem with the Sonnet card, I pulled the ribbon cable from the Sonnet card and connected the 80GB Jaguar disk directly to the motherboard's IDE controller (disconnecting the 6GB disk first).
Guess what? The Jaguar disk booted immediately, without incident. (!)
I connected the 6GB disk to the Sonnet card. Not only did the Jaguar disk continue boot normally, but the 10.1.5 system boots fine when connected to the Sonnet card! So does the OS 9.2.1 system on a separate partition of the same 6GB disk. I re-installed the SCSI card (not that I use it anymore, but it's there) and all seems to be well.
My only misgiving is that now the ATA-100 drive is connected to an ATA-33 controller and probably won't be fast enough to capture digital video from my Firewire camcorder. I guess I can always buy a new ATA-100 drive to replace the 6 GB drive.
Thrilling stuff, huh?
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