First, the technical: 24MB RAM, 750 MB HD, 10.4 in. active LCD, OS 8.1,
broken floppy drive. For about a year, it has been starting up unreliably:
it will boot to the Mac OS/Welcome to Macintosh screen, begin to load the
OS, and freeze once the progress bar has progressed about a quarter inch.
Rebooting doesn�t help. Booting without extensions doesn�t help. Zapping
the PRAM doesn�t help. Repairing the disk doesn�t help. The kick is this:
sometimes it boots fine. It will randomly decide to boot up without a
hitch(usually to the tune of me praying desperately that it will boot this
time because of that important whatever). The floppy drive used to work,
and I could boot off a Disk Tools PPC disk with that. I also copied the
Disk Tools� System Folder to a 16 MB CompactFlash card. When the floppy
drive decided to give up the ghost, I used the CF card to boot. Eventually
I came up with an idea that would have been brilliant had I thought of it
months before: scan it with Tech Tool. TT found a damaged/corrupted system
file. That�s easy to deal with, I thought, I�ll do a fresh install off the
8.1 CD. I proceeded to do so with an external CD-Rom drive, and all went
well. It even booted OK after that�twice. I then had the
far-less-brilliant idea of copying the System Folder off the hard disk onto
the CF card. I had suspected the hard disk for some time, and thought maybe
a corrupted disk sector containing part of a system file might be the
problem. As you can guess, I now have no functional startup media at all.
Thus, my question: how to install an earlier OS than 8.1, since multiple
clean installs haven�t remedied the problem, without a floppy. Is there any
type of external SCSI drive that is bootable without a driver?
_________________________________________________________________
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