Boot old Mac, or at least mount disks?

[laserfan]

I'm having trouble booting my old Power Mac 6100/66 (which IIRC worked perfectly when I shut it down) but it's been 15 years or more (and a move or two) since using it and I can't remember even basic troubleshooting techniques. I hope someone here is willing to (try to) jog my memory a bit but here's what I have so far:

1. The CMOS battery was long dead and I got a new one and it (tries to) boot now

2. It does not boot from the internal drive (flashing disk ? icon)

3. It will boot though using my Mac OS 8 Disk Tools 2 floppy disk

4. My hard drive appears on the desktop ("Laserfan's Mac") but when I open it, the window shows a file with a blank icon which iirc is named "Where_have_all_my_files_gone_?" or some such and is itself un-openable

5. Despite 4. when I run Disk Tools it says the drive is OK for whatever that is worth

I recall having an external drive or two but the one I found and tried, with active terminator, didn't help matters--I thought maybe I'd been booting to the external drive for some reason but either I'm wrong about that or the ext drive itself died on-the-shelf. The pushbutton on it is set as "1" which I think is probably right.

What might item 4. mean? EDIT: Oops I didn't search on the right terms earlier I guess. No doubt the floppy I used to boot the Mac has an older OS on it, and the PowerMac is prolly loaded with 8.5 since I have that CD in my CD box. Hmmm I wonder if I can boot the thing with the CD--will have to try.

Is there a reasonably cheap PC SCSI external e.g. USB adapter, or internal card that is useable to mount SCSI disks to PCs (I do have MacDrive on one of my computers, that I've used to read Zip disks) so I might at least see what's on my (many) Mac SCSI hard drives? EDIT AGAIN: I find a SCSI card for $109 on Amazon but maybe it makes more sense to buy a used Mac????

Any help or advice is welcome, and hopefully my ancient Mac wisdom (we had an original Mac, and a Lisa/Big Mac, and a IIsi etc. etc. before going-over the The Dark Side) will come flooding-back to me. Right now I feel dumb as a rock. I'd of course much prefer to get this thing running again vs. mounting disks on a PC just to look at files...

TIA for any advice!

 

[MacTech68]

You're correct about the "Where have all my files gone?".

The problem here is that you're only seeing the "HFS Wrapper", and Disk First Aid will only see and repair the wrapper. As you noted, you'll need at least MacOS 8.1 or higher to be able to see the HFS Plus volume and repair it (if it is damaged).

The only other issue I can think of is that the drive doesn't contain a bootable system folder, and you may have been using a external drive to boot from 15 years ago.

 

[laserfan]

I appreciate your reply! Seems crazy that I might have loaded the OS to an external drive but that's probably the issue. Too bad the ext drive doesn't seem to work...



Any ideas about inspecting the SCSI drives? It seems a cheaper way to connect these things might be to buy an old-but-working Mac from eBay!

 

[MacTech68]

No CD drive to try that 8.5 install CD ? You should be able to use Disk First Aid from 8.5.

IMHO, if you're seeing the HFS wrapper on the hard rive when booted from a floppy, then there's probably nothing wrong with the drive other than a corrupted directory structure or bad blocks.

AFAIK, you will need a Mac to perform repairs to the directories.

 

[laserfan]

No CD drive to try that 8.5 install CD ?

I will try that next--I wasn't sure if the 8.5 CD would boot the OS and allow me to inspect the computer. I guess my Mac brain cells are in worse shape than I thought!



The other thing I can't recall is how the SCSI chain works. I assume any Internal drive is always 0, the ext drive I have seems to be set at 1, when I find my Apple CD drive it should have a similar PB I suppose. But if I didn't say it already the active terminator with LED is on my ext drive.

Maybe my problem is as simple as: I used to have the Mac and the CD drive and the Ext all connected at one time and the SCSI chain demands that...

Anyway THANKS for your replies!

 

[laserfan]

Omigosh I got it to boot! Found the old Apple 300 CD drive, and a caddy, loaded my 8.5 System CD and it didn't work at first, but after some surfing I found the NVRAM reset procedure which I sure didn't recall (I HAD done the Command-Option-P-R thing to reset Parameter RAM).

Anyway that did the trick I think, and once the Mac booted to 8.5, I was able to open my onboard hard drive and see the files there. I started to surf on "blessing" the System Folder therein and in the process noted that magically it got the special icon (by itself!?) and when I tried a Restart, this time it booted to the internal hard drive!!! Version 8.6!



Apparently I have system & apps on the internal drive, and docs on an external, which makes sense though now I have to see about looking at other SCSI disks I have.

Thanks MacTech68 for the couple comments--I needed someone to bounce my problems off'n and it seems to have worked...

 

[MacTech68]

Well done, and enjoy the walk down memory lane!

 

[laserfan]

It's really odd, but the external drive that I'd thought was broken also came-to-life when I got the internal to boot, and the ext has a System Folder on it also, so when I blessed THAT (by just opening it once apparently) now the Mac boots from the external enclosure.

Funny it was "only" 20 years ago since I built this thing but I remember so very little about it...