[rescue] Odd Mac startup problem

[Phil Stracchino]

Hoping for a little troubleshooting advice from the Mac folks.

We have a 7300/180 upgraded with a Sonnet G3/300 card.  About 328MB of
RAM, two hard disks (I just put the second one in tonight), CDROM,
running MacOS 9.1 (or 9.1.2, I don't recall offhand).  I have the cache
speed pushed up somewhat to 3:2 instead of the default 2:1, but it
appears fully stable at that speed.

It has a consistent weird behavior that has been going on for at least a
month and I cannot for the life of me find the cause.  Power it on, all
the appropriate indicator lights come on, the hard drive spins up
(actually, now, both hard drives spin up), but it doesn't boot.  Zip,
nada, no sad mac, not even a vertical-blank signal to the monitor -- it
just sits there.  Shut it off and immediately power it back on again,
and on the second try, it boots flawlessly every time.

Anyone have any suggestions? About the only thing I can think of is some
kind of flakiness on the boot disk, perhaps a stiction problem in the
head actuator.  But I've never seen a stiction problem that acts like
this before, or this consistently.



-- 
 .*********  Fight Back!  It may not be just YOUR life at risk.  *********.
 : phil stracchino : unix ronin : renaissance man : mystic zen biker geek :
 :  alaric at caerllewys.net|phil-stracchino at earthlink.net|phil at novylen.net  :
 :   2000 CBR929RR, 1991 VFR750F3 (foully murdered), 1986 VF500F (sold)   :
 :    Linux Now!   ...Because friends don't let friends use Microsoft.    :