🚀 go-pugleaf

Thanks to all of the people who responded to my CD-ROM plight.

Just in case this happens to be useful to anyone else...

The correct answer turned out to be:

    Date: Wed, 23 Jul 1997 02:45 PDT
    From: Peter Grace <PeterG@deftech.demon.co.uk>

    I think that you have an extensions conflict, when the CD-ROM drive is not 
    connected its driver extension will not load. The MacIvory support was 
    written to use Apple CD-ROM drives with standard CD-ROM support files. 

I'm fairly confident that I've confirmed this. The software that came with
the CD-ROM included "D2 CD Init" (version 3.2.5). I can leave the SCSI
configuration alone and just disable/enable loading of the init and cause
the MacIvory SCSI problem to disappear/reappear.

Peter went on to suggest:

    Try putting the CD-ROM extension loose in the system folder rather than in 
    the extensions folder, it will then load last, hopefully not then
    conflicting with the MacIvory extension. 

Because I already have Conflict Catcher 3 installed, I can play around with
things like load order and dependencies in a bit more elegant way. Adding to
the complexity of the problem is the fact that there are four other inits
involved: "Foreign File Access", "Audio CD Access", "High Sierra File Access",
and "ISO 9660 File Access". Fortunately, it appears that they are irrelevant
to the problem. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any relative ordering
between all of these and the MacIvory init (control panel) which would solve
the problem. As far as I can tell, the MacIvory always has a SCSI problem
when "D2 CD Init" is loaded.

Peter also suggested:

    If the above fails try a package such as FWB CDToolkit, have used this OK
    on systems in the UK.

and in follow-up messages:

    ...to confirm that FWB CD-Toolkit operates OK on my system here.

    I am using Quadra 900/24MB RAM, about 3.5GB total disk, MacIvory 3 8MW FPA,
    System B1-7.5.5 (British), Genera 8.3, MacIvory support 4.2.1.2 (latest), 
    Sony CD-ROM CDU-415.

    I have check I can read the MacIvory files and under Genera 8.3 the source 
    files on the Genera 8.3 CD-ROM.

and this contact info:

    FWB Inc., 1555 Adams Drive, Memlo Park, CA 94025
    Phone 415-325-4FWB    Sales-Fax  415-833-4655
    Home Page http://www.fwb.com     Email: info@fwb.com

I have not yet followed up on this because I'm in the midst of a bunch of
travel which will keep me pretty busy for another month or so. At least I
can now boot the Mac one way to use the CD-ROM drive and another way to
use the MacIvory without having to screw around with the physical cabling
(which I also don't trust and plan to replace due to some wisdom from
David Gadbois).

Thanks also for this tidbit:

    Date: Wed, 23 Jul 1997 14:06 PDT
    From: reti@ai.mit.edu

	Date: Tue, 22 Jul 1997 11:24 EDT
	From: rdp@netcom.com (Robert Pfeiffer)

	The crash is typically (always?) preceded by the tape drive erroneously
	being accessed (it has a characteristic "chattering" sound).

    In my experience, this usually means that someone did a SCSI reset, rather 
    than accessing the tape drive explicitly.  This is often a fallback
    strategy for error recovery, i.e. reset the SCSI bus and try again.

I now see that, "it's not just a tape drive, it's also an audible SCSI
error detector." :-)

This actually turned out to be pretty handy because the SCSI reset was always
indicative of the problem being present and it often happened a number of times
before the Mac would actually hang. Thus I was able to go around the
troubleshooting loop faster. And, because it was audible, I could turn my
attenion elsewhere (i.e. a Win95 PC) while Genera was coming up and my
lispm-init was loading and still know right away when the problem was detected.