[nucFlash]

I have been slowly refitting a Power Mac 9600 as a personal project/hobby. I recently replaced the 200mhz. 604e processor with a 400mhz. G3. I filled the RAM slots with RAM from around my shop. I installed an ATTO 68 pin SCSI card (40Mb max transfer rate) and two 68 pin, 50 GB, 7200rpm SCSI hard drives in the two available bays.

Do to a bad experience with a PM 7500, I set both hard drives for delayed spin up. The original 4 GB 50 pin SCSI drive (the one installed above the power supply) is set normally (no delay). The problem is that the drive spins up immediately after the machine is powered up and the computer always defaults to it as the startup disk. Because the other two disks do not immediately spin up, they are ignored until part-way through start up (I can hear them spin up).

I'm sorry if I'm not being very clear, but I'll some up my problem. I need the computer to pause after it starts up to allow time for the two additional SCSI drives to spin up. I'm hoping that is all that is needed to allow the machine to startup with them from a cold boot (If I simply restart the machine after it is running, the drives never stop spinning so it will successfully reboot using either of the two drives, it just can't startup from them from a cold boot).

My question in a nut shell is if their is a way (possible in Open Firmware?) to cause the machine to pause after first power-up for 60 seconds or so, giving time for the drives to spin up and for it to find them when it comes time to actually begin the boot sequence.

Any help would be appreciated. TIA.

[reader50]

Activate the bootup RAM test. That should delay things enough for what you want. You can access the on-off pref for the bootup RAM test by holding down ... option (I think) when you select the Memory control panel.

The 9600 is an Old World Mac, it does not have Open Firmware. Is there a reason not to set all drives to spin up right away?

[IFLY2HIGH]

Check the jumpers on the two drives that are not spinning up immediatly upon power up. You'll prolly need to remove a jumper to enable Auto Spin upon power up. The drives are waiting to be seen by the system's interface card before they power up. What brand drives are they? Most SCSI drives should have the jumper settings listed on the bottom and should have details of what to set. You want No Delay.

[nucFlash]

Originally Posted by reader50

Activate the bootup RAM test. That should delay things enough for what you want. You can access the on-off pref for the bootup RAM test by holding down ... option (I think) when you select the Memory control panel.

The 9600 is an Old World Mac, it does not have Open Firmware. Is there a reason not to set all drives to spin up right away?

I originially set them to a delay after shorting out a couple of drives in a Power Mac 7500. I was told (I can't even remember by who now) that in the older Macs, you had to set the drives in a delay fashion to prevent this.

However, after reading the replies here, I set them both to no delay and there does not seem to be a problem.

Thanks to everyone for their help.