Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!hp4nl!dutrun!galaxy!leo From: leo@duttnph.tudelft.nl (Leo Breebaart) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system Subject: I ruined my hard disk with System 7.0 Summary: help! Message-ID: Date: 31 Jan 91 11:29:03 GMT Sender: news@dutrun.UUCP Reply-To: leo@duttnph.tudelft.nl Lines: 54 I have been a naughty boy. Daddy told me not to play with fire. I did so anyway, got badly burned, and am now running crying to Mama. Substitute 'Apple' for 'Daddy', 'System 7.0' for 'fire' and 'this group' for 'Mama', and you have my current problem in a nutshell. I suppose some people will just shrug, laugh, and say that it's my own fault. But perhaps some of you will take pity on me, and try to help me. The situation: I have an SE/30 with a 40Mb internal hard disk and a 170 Mb external hard disk. Both disks had system 6.0.7 installed, with the external disk as my startup disk. When I was offered the chance to try out the System 7.0 beta, I jumped at it. But I had not enough empty diskettes at the time; and unthinkingly I did something incredibly stupid: I copied all the original System 7.0 diskettes to the external hard disk in order to store them temporarily until I got me some new diskettes. Forgetting of course the simple fact that the Mac was not going to like all those new system files now residing on my startup disk. If I turn on my Mac, I get the diskette icon with the flashing question mark, i.e. it does not even recognize the (unchanged) internal hard disk. It does not matter if the external disk is turned on or off. Floppy (6.0.x) startups are possible, but neither of the two hard disks then gets recognized or mounted. Silverlining tells me that SCSI ports 0 and 6 are 'in use' but it doesn't know with what ('0 Mb Drive'). If I disconnect the external disk from the SCSI port (and only then) will the Mac start up correctly using the internal hard disk. No problem. The next thing I tried was installing 7.0 correctly on the internal disk, but the Mac still only starts up if the external hard disk is not connected to the SCSI port. (And yes, system 7.0 looks really great, but all of a sudden I don't care so much about that any more :-( ) Can anybody tell me what happened and what I can possibly do to make my external disk readable again? Finally: yes, I have backups of (almost) everything that was on that external disk - I am not *that* stupid. But I would prefer doing a reformat only if there is really no other alternative. Hence this plea for help. Many thanks in advance... Peace, -- Leo Breebaart (leo @ duttnph.tudelft.nl)