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From: scholz@ncrcae.Columbia.NCR.COM (Carl Scholz)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: HELP!!
Message-ID: <2785@ncrcae.Columbia.NCR.COM>
Date: Fri, 20-Nov-87 14:46:56 EST
Article-I.D.: ncrcae.2785
Posted: Fri Nov 20 14:46:56 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 22-Nov-87 15:44:05 EST
References: <537@eplrx7.UUCP>
Reply-To: scholz@ncrcae.UUCP (Carl Scholz)
Organization: NCR Corp., Engineering & Manufacturing - Columbia, SC
Lines: 57
Keywords: My Mac II disk is down

In article <537@eplrx7.UUCP> lad@eplrx7.UUCP (Lawrence Dziegielewski) writes:
>
>I have a major crisis here.  One of my Mac II's equipped with an Apple
...
>Upon rebooting,  the Mac became stuck at the "Welcome to
>Macintosh" banner.  Since it stayed there for more than
>7 minutes,  I decided to push the dreaded programmer's 
>switch.
>
>From then on,  whenever the Mac tries to boot,  the 'happy mac' shows up for
>about 3 or 4 seconds,  and then disappears to a blinking ? disk icon.
>
>This is what I tried to do to get it back:
>
>	1.	Apple HD SC Setup,  vers 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 & 1.5
>	2.	Disk First Aid.	Recognizes the volume "Apple 80".  I
>		usually hit the "CNTL-S" so I can see what's going on inside
>		the program.  Disk 1st Aid starts checking the disk,  and	
>		always stops after checking the catalog btree with an
>		"Unable to verify status of disk" error.  No dice,  no boot.
>	3.	Various and sundry things,  including just booting a 
>		floppy,  upon which the Mac tells me "This disk is damaged,
>		Do you want to initialize?"   NO!,  of course not,  my
>		data is still there!!!
>
>I'm stumped.  My data is still on that disk,  we don't have a recent backup,
>(I know,  I know,  please,  no messages saying "You should back up, I KNOW!),
>and I'm in deep poop.  

I have been having the EXACT same problem on my system: Mac 512ke, Sys 5.5, 
Finder 4.2, with a home-grown 40Meg SCSI drive.  The _exact_ same symptoms
have happened to me more time than I can count since I've had the drive 
up and running (about 3 months).  Unfortunately, Lawrence, the only solution
I've found is to reformat the drive.  I learned after the second time, and
bought DiskFit ( a great backup utility) and now I RELIGIOUSLY backup 
everything after each session (usually only about 3-5 minutes to backup).

What I have found is that after you boot from a floppy, say NO to "Do
you want to initialize".  Then I run Disk 1st Aid, although not in
"scavenge" mode, and it finds a problem and repairs it.  Then I when
I quit Disk 1st Aid, the SCSI drive shows up.  At this point, it works 
fine (i.e. for an immediate backup), but the system still won't boot off
of it - have to reformat to get that back.  Sorry.

On occasion, if I wait long enough (although 7 minutes sounded long enough),
the drive will actually boot, but as soon as I hit the reset or power-off,
I know I'll have to reformat.

Hope this helps, although I too would love to hear a good explanation
for what is happening and what to fix.


-- 
Carl S. Scholz		{scubed,ihnp4,gatech,cbosgd}!ncr-sd!ncrcae!fido!scholz
NCR E&M Columbia  3325 Platt Springs Rd., W. Columbia, SC 29169   (803)791-6445
Entry Level Systems Development
"There's no dark side of the moon, really, matter of fact, it's all dark._Cint.