[vja4him]

My SE/30 boots, extensions load, finder appears, both volumes appear (each one is 1/2 GB), then the deadly bomb appears. Restart, same things happens.

Restart with extensions off, and the computer is just fine. I can open Microsoft Word and play games with no problems. The computer was working just fine with all extensions on last night. I was copying files from a ZIP disk. Was able to copy about 130MB with no problems, and then while checking out several applications, the bomb appeared.

Now, I can't restart successfully with extensions on. Any ideas what may be going on here? I'd like to resolve this issue and get things back to normal. Thanks!

Oh yes, I already ran TechTool Pro v2.1.1, Disk First Aid 7.2.2, Disk Tester 3.7.2, Disk Verify 1.1, and no problems were found.

-- vjamacaddict
-- SE/30, System 7.1, 86MB RAM, 1GB HD

[Big Mac]

The SE/30 was a terrific Mac. Do you still get use out of it?

Extensions conflicts can manifest themselves intermittently. It could be the load order. Do you have Conflict Catcher? But it definitely sounds like a conflict, if all is well when they're off.

[bowwowman]

Yep, sure sounds like an extension conflict to me.......
Open the extensions manager application, make a duplicate of the set that works, then start turning groups of related exts on or off and restart to narrow down the conflict........

Once located, you can try to fix it, be it loading order or actual hard conflict.....

may be that you will need seperate sets for different uses...ie

1 base set to boot the system and do basic things,
1 set to use for this or that function, where by the conflicting exts are NOT loading in the same set.....

[vja4him]

Hello -- Thanks for your reply. Yes, we still use our SE/30 (have three that are still running just fine, and my first computer, the SE, not SE/30, with an SE/30 motherboard swap, also running great!). My boys love to play the old games.

A friend is staying with us, and I thought I'd get out my best SE/30, with 86MB of RAM, and show him what the old monster can do. He is a hard-core Windows person, and we have been having fun showing him just two of our Macs -- our G4 iBook and the SE/30.

I'm wondering why the SE/30 was running great, and then all of a sudden it won't complete the start up. I never installed anything that caused this. I was simply transferring files from a ZIP disk to the HD on the SE/30.

I'll try dragging as many extensions as possible from the System Folder, to disable them, and then install them one at a time. Maybe this will reveal the culprit?

-- vjamacaddict
-- SE/30, System 7.1, 86MB RAM

Originally Posted by Big Mac

The SE/30 was a terrific Mac. Do you still get use out of it?

Extensions conflicts can manifest themselves intermittently. It could be the load order. Do you have Conflict Catcher? But it definitely sounds like a conflict, if all is well when they're off.

[Detrius]

System 7.5 had the extension manager, and now it's a free update. You may want to consider upgrading. Using MacTCP, it also had TCP/IP support.

[Millennium]

Originally Posted by vja4him

I'll try dragging as many extensions as possible from the System Folder, to disable them, and then install them one at a time. Maybe this will reveal the culprit?

That will work, but there's a faster way.

Take all of your extensions, disable half of them (it doesn't really matter how you pick them), and reboot. If you still get the bomb then you know the "guilty" extension is in the group of extensions enabled. If you don't get the bomb, then it's in the group you disabled. Set aside the group which doesn't have the extension; you don't need to test those anymore.

Now, disable half of the extensions you still have left and reboot. Once again, if you get the bomb then it's in that group, otherwise it's in the other group. Once again, set aside the group that doesn't bomb; the extension you're looking for is not there.

Disable half the extensions you still have left and reboot again. Same story as before; set aside the group which doesn't bomb.

By now, if you started with ten extensions, you should only have two left to check. If not, then keep going with the reboot-and-divide strategy until you're down to two. Disable one of two remaining extensions and reboot. If the system still bombs, then that is the guilty extension; if not, it's the other one.

The point behind this? Let's take the ten-extension case again. If you reboot one at a time, you might get lucky and hit the extension on your first or second try, but more likely you'll have to reboot five or six times, and at worst you might have to reboot nine times. If you do it this way, however, then you're guaranteed to find the guilty extension in only four reboots. If you have more extensions, it only gets better; even if you start with a hundred then you'll only have to reboot seven times.

This was a common trick for diagnosing extension conflicts back in the OS9 days. It came from computer science, where kind of thing is called a binary search, and it's great when you have to find one item out of a large collection.

[krove]

This thread sure brings back memories of my LC III, my first mac. I was just recalling the other day when there were no desktop pictures, just desktop patterns that one set or drew oneself in the General control panel. Ah, the good ol' days.

[analogika]

The problem, of course, with that extension checking business (ah, the memories - and the reason I finally gave up on OS 9 after twelve years of Classic Mac usage) is that in rare cases, you could actually have a conflict that would only happen if two specific extensions were loaded together, or - even better - in the wrong order!

Occasionally, there were known conflicts where you actually had to re-name certain extensions to get them to load in a different order at start-up.

It always gets me when people wax nostalgic over OS 9, and then have the nerve to cite "user-friendliness" as one of the points mourned...

-s*