My church has a Starmax 4000/160 with 96 Mb RAM and Mac OS 8.1. The machine has been very reliable. However, the IDE CD-Rom quit Saturday. (Okay, maybe I killed it but I don't think so.) I went to install an old Ricoh SCSI CDRW (on ID 4) I had removed from one of my systems and then could not reboot. I pulled the Starmax out and the install went fine. When I hooked everything up I got a happy mac, extensions loaded but that's where things stopped. The desktop never came up.
Things I tried
1) Removed power and scsi cable from cdrw. Checked to see that all IDE, SCSI and floppy cables were tightly connected. They were. Same result on boot.
2) Moved the hard drive to another Starmax skeleton to check for head crash or other HDD problems from moving things around. It worked like a charm. Noted there was not CDROM in this test machine. Immediatly made a backup of the HDD.
3) Moved the HDD back into the original Starmax. Pulled the IDE and power from the CD-ROM. Rechecked internal cables. Booted up perfectly.
4) Reconnected the SCSI CDRW. Booted up perfectly. However, I could not read from the CD. If I had a working CD I could install the drivers and Toast and things would probably be fine. The ZIP disk was not connected so there might be a termination issue as well. Concluded CDRW was not causing the problem.
5) Pulled power and SCSI cable from the CDRW. Swapped an old generic IDE CDROM from a PC into the Starmax and it booted perfectly. However, I could not read from the CD. Probably a driver issue, presume Motorola CDROM failed.
6) Pulled the Motorola IDE CDROM from my brothers Starmax 3000 and installed it in place of the generic. Back to original lockup in boot process. Problem must be with the IDE1 controller or cable. Replaced cable with same result. Problem must be with failed IDE1 controller.
7) Tried to set my brother's CDROM to slave and the HDD to master on IDE0. If my memory is correct this will not work on a Starmax anyway but I was desperate. Booted up fine, but still unable to read from the CDROM.
8) Going to start looking through my scrap pile for an old SCSI CDROM and try to get the CDROM and CDRW both on the SCSI chain.
Any ideas?
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