[Chris O'Brien]

OK, I originally posted this here, but there's been no responses, so I'm going to start a new thread, because the problem is still persisting and becoming rather annoying.

So here goes:

I bought an 80gig maxtor hard drive to go in my rev A B&W G3 400MHz and I'm having a slight problem. There's only one IDE/ATA slot, so i took out the other drive (the main one I used all the time) and replaced it with the 80gig. I then installed panther and now whenever I try an boot the mac it crashes ("You need to restart your computer") straight away. I can sometimes get it to boot into safe mode, but sometimes whilst doing the safe boot it will just restart itself before getting to the login screen.

I booted it in verbose mode and it's failing at IOSCSI... Removing the SCSI card I have (for another hard drive in there) didn't help (I was desperate, so was trying anything).

Anyone got any ideas? When in safe mode I can copy files etc and use the hard drive fine, so it seems to me that there's something not set right for the system to boot properly - but what?

I presumed it'd be OK to just take out a hard drive and start afresh with a new one. So what's the problem? I've jumpered it to be a master, what else do I need to do (if anything)?

Cheers for any help.

[jmiddel]

Some ideas.

Try resetting PRAM: When you hear the startup sound, press and hold down simultaneously the Command-Option-P-R keys. Continue to hold the keys until you hear the startup sound four times.

Try to reboot in OpenFirmware mode: press and hold down simultaneously the Command-Option-O-F keys.

What startup items have you added? If you have, try to remove them.

Can you repair permissions from the Disk Utility?

Could you boot from DiskWarrior CD (Command-C at restart) and rebuild volume structure?

From the IOSCSI clue, the computer may not have realized that the scsi is disconnected, and you may have to reset the motherboard via the reset switch, which is a small thing somewhere on the board. Search apple support for reset or cuda switch for your model.

[OzarkMtn]

Go into System Preferences, then select Startup Disk, then be sure you have selected the correct Hard Drive.

[Chris O'Brien]

OK, so I've tried everything mentioned so far before I posted this question, with the exception of Disk Warrior and resetting the motherboard.

I'm going to have a go at resolving the issue on Sunday, or Monday (too much to do until then), so I'll report back what I find then...

It does seem a weird problem though - it's kind of a hit or miss whether I can get it into safe boot or not. Woe is me - when I do get it booted, the increase in seek times makes a lot difference, and I miss it when I come back to this drive.

Cheers for everything so far, anyway.

[tooki]

I can tell you exactly what's going on: the IDE controller in Rev A blue and whites is buggy, and won't work with most drives that are newer than the one the computer shipped with. This is a widely-documented problem (unfortunately!), and the only fix is to add a PCI ATA controller card.

tooki

[Chris O'Brien]

Oh great - having a quick look around, it seems that the card will be more expensive than the frigging hard drive.

Ah well, cheers tooki.

[tooki]

If you don't mind booting off the original drive, it may be cheaper to put the new drive in a FireWire enclosure and use it that way.

tooki

[Chris O'Brien]

Yeah, I suppose I could do that. Can you boot off of firewire drives?

I'm a bit curious as to why the drive will boot into safe mode with nary a hitch - I'm using it now, in fact. So what's the difference between safe boot and normal boot? I read somewhere that it only uses apple extensions when booting into safe mode, but this is a clean install of Panther - so what isn't it loading that means I can use the drive?

Anyhoo - I don't want to be permanently in safe mode in order to use this disk, but it would seem that the disk itself is fine. I don't know

[Chris O'Brien]

So, I decided to be a wee bit daring since this is a fresh install of OS X and any damage isn't really a problem. I renamed IOSCSIArchitectureModelFamily.kext and IOSCSIParallelFamily.back (found in /System/Library/Extensions) to have .back as their extensions and also deleted Extensions.kextcache. I was quite (happily) surprised that I can now boot into normal mode... Not ideal - and restarting the comp makes it sh*t a brick, but, since getting into safe mode and being able to play around is easy enough, I can quite often get it to boot normally by playing around.

I imagine this isn't advised (and is definitely not the solution I'm looking for), but, at least for now, I can get my mac to boot from me new hard drive.

It does seem that this is actually a software issue rather than a flaky IDE controller - although, it could all be coincidence.

[Sod Off Sadr]

Originally posted by Black Book:
Yeah, I suppose I could do that. Can you boot off of firewire drives?

yes.

[tooki]

Wrong. Blue and white G3s cannot boot from FireWire or USB devices. Only Macs with AGP can do that.

tooki