[rescue] Odd Mac startup problem

[Tim H.]

On Sat, 1 May 2004 02:36:29 -0400
Phil Stracchino <alaric at caerllewys.net> wrote:

> Hoping for a little troubleshooting advice from the Mac folks.
> 
> We have a 7300/180 upgraded with a Sonnet G3/300 card.  About 328MB of
> RAM, two hard disks (I just put the second one in tonight), CDROM,
> running MacOS 9.1 (or 9.1.2, I don't recall offhand).  I have the
> cache speed pushed up somewhat to 3:2 instead of the default 2:1, but
> it appears fully stable at that speed.
> 
> It has a consistent weird behavior that has been going on for at least
> a month and I cannot for the life of me find the cause.  Power it on,
> all the appropriate indicator lights come on, the hard drive spins up
> (actually, now, both hard drives spin up), but it doesn't boot.  Zip,
> nada, no sad mac, not even a vertical-blank signal to the monitor --
> it just sits there.  Shut it off and immediately power it back on
> again, and on the second try, it boots flawlessly every time.
> 
> Anyone have any suggestions? About the only thing I can think of is
> some kind of flakiness on the boot disk, perhaps a stiction problem in
> the head actuator.  But I've never seen a stiction problem that acts
> like this before, or this consistently.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
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> 
I had a similar issue on a PC, in that case the hard drive just wasn't
ready in time.  A cold boot would always fail, a restart would always
work.  IIRC I set something in the bios on that box that took a litttle
more time before it polled the drives, maybe turned on a longer memory
test, then it was fine.  I don't know if that is your problem, but the
symptoms sound similar.

Tim