[Gron-gron]

I think the SCSI controller on my PowerMac 7500 is dying. I have the factory 500MB drive and a Seagate 4.5GB drive. Both are using Apple's drivers.

Lately, the Seagate drive does not mount when I boot. It used to come up when I forced it with SCSI Probe, but now it won't come up at all. Then yesterday, it came back up. I checked it with Disk First Aid, and it was ok. When I rebooted, the drive disappeared again.

The System folder is on the 500MB drive, and twice the 7500 refused to boot (blinky question mark at boot), but I was able to boot it with a CD and then it rebooted from the drive ok.

Is this a problem with the motherboard SCSI controller?

Also, I took the $50 SCSI card that I got with my G4/450, and put that in the 7500 and then hooked up the drives to that instead of the motherboard SCSI connector. The 7500 wouldn't boot at all, and the screen stayed black the whole time. Do I have to disable the on-board SCSI first? And if so, how?

Thanks in advance,

Gron-gron

[reader50]

This sounds like the battery is going dead in the 7500. Does the clock in the 7500 lose track of the time on a regular basis?

The drivers on the 2 SCSI drives could be corrupted also. Disk First Aid does not check for that. See if the drives will mount on the G4. If mount problems continue, use Drive Setup to update the drivers on both SCSI drives.

[Gron-gron]

I haven't had problems with the clock losing track of the time. Is there any other way of checking the battery (software perhaps)?

I'm pretty sure that the drivers are up to date, but I'll check it. As for the Seagate 4.5GB drive, when I run Drive Setup, it tells me that there is no disk in the drive, although it doesn't give any other indication that it might think that it's a removable drive. In any case, because it thinks the disk isn't there, it won't update the drivers. But it does see the drive in the list of SCSI devices, as does SCSIProbe.

BTW, I zapped the PRAM using the demo version of TechTool (instead of the Cmd-Opt-P-R method). No change.