Macintosh Portable: External Hard Drives and "Sad Mac" Errors


Are there problems with connecting an external SCSI hard drive to the
Macintosh Portable? I have a Macintosh Portable with an internal 40MB
drive. When I tried to connect a 45MB external drive, the Macintosh
Portable refused to boot. The "Sad Mac" icon came up with the error code:
0000000F 00000002.

The hard drive is a Jasmine Direct Drive 45 that has been with a Macintosh
Plus. I checked the usual things: The external hard drive was powered up
and running before I powered on the Portable. There was no System Folder
on the external hard drive. The drive was terminated and had a unique
SCSI ID.

Am I overlooking something? Can the Portable support an external hard
drive?

The Macintosh Portable can access and use any external SCSI device that a
Macintosh Plus can access. There may be an issue with the SCSI driver on
the hard drive and compatibility with the Portable boot ROMs, but we do
not have any information on this problem.

The error message you gave above is roughly equivalent to an "ID=02" --
meaning that you can't really use it seriously to diagnose the problem. It
does tell you that some piece of recently-loaded software got clobbered,
but it's a guess to say whether it was due to software corruption, SCSI
signal problems, incompatible drivers, or all of the above.

The best thing to do when getting this kind of error message is contact
the third-party's service organization for any possible information on
driver compatibility.


Published Date: Feb 18, 2012