Mac SE FDHD with dead HDD - boot and run from floppy drive alone? HDD type?

Question

Hello!
I picked up a Mac SE FDHD a few months back - a model with a Superdrive and hard drive, as well as 4 MB of RAM. It came with a keyboard and mouse, but no floppies of any kind. Upon testing, I discovered that the hard drive did not work - the "flashing question mark folder" appears at startup, and the disk setup utility on the system 6 install disks I created using a more modern mac can't detect it. I don't hear HDD seek sounds either. Everything else works fine, as far as I can tell. The reason I want to use this old Mac is simply to boot it up and run a few favorite old programs (such as MacPaint and many old games), so I don't want to put too much money into it.
I discovered my parents still owned a old, 170 MB "LaCie Tsunami" SCSI external drive, used with our long-failed Mac II, and decided to use as the SE's boot drive, as a cheap workaround to avoid buying a "new" drive. However, after a rather odd turn of events (described below for information purposes), it turns out that the 50-pin SCSI drive itself functions, but in the process, I think I killed the enclosure. Unless this drive can replace the internal drive of the SE, (or get lucky and find a compatible drive somewhere), I'll need to run the SE from its single floppy drive.
I figure that since the original Mac had 128k of memory, a single 800k floppy, and no hard drive, and yet can still run OS 7, the SE should be able to run system 6 from floppies somehow. The question is how? Is there a tutorial online somewhere on how to set this up?
Furthermore, as far as the hard drive is concerned, is the SE's internal drive a standard 50 pin SCSI HDD, and thus likely compatible with the one from the LaCie?
Thanks for any suggestions, and for helping this "Old time Mac Newbie" out!
-Dan
PS: What happened to the LaCie drive - for information purposes:
WHen I attached to the LaCie drive to the SE and booted the OS 6 install disks, t worked - OS 6 installed to it just fine. However, it turns out that a "dormant" copy of Norton utilities reactivated when I booted to the SCSI drive, and encrypted the disk's partition table. (Why it was not encrypted BEFORE installing and booting OS 6, I don't know) Having not used the drive for 17 years , and thus not knowing the password, I had to reformat it. I have a Sawtooth G4 with an Apple SCSI card - but no cable that would go from the PCI card's SCSI port to the external enclosure. THus, I removed the drive from the enclosure, mounted it in the G4 internally, and formatted it as Mac OS Standard (with OS 9 drivers) using Mac OS 10.3. Upon re-installing the drive in its SCSI enclosure, I found that it no longer works - Norton was erased, but the SE gives me a "Sad Mac" icon upon boot. Furthermore, after borrowing the correct SCSI cable, I found the enclosure now kernel panics my G4 when attached. The drive itself, when mounted internally in the G4, still functions perfectly. Thus, it seems that either the enclosure is dead, or something about OS X's reformat is renders the HDD incompatible with the enclosure...

Answer 1

"I removed the drive from the enclosure, mounted it in the G4 internally, and formatted it as Mac OS Standard (with OS 9 drivers) using Mac OS 10.3."
I just re-checked Disk Utility's format options under Panther and only see "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" or "Mac OS Extended." I don't see an option for formatting Mac OS Standard. Are you certain that you formatted the drive as a Mac OS Standard (HFS) volume? If it's a Mac OS Extended (HFS+) volume, that would explain why it won't work when connected to the SE. When using external SCSI enclosures having a hard drive or optical drive, I always opted to connect an "active" SCSI terminator to the unused SCSI port on the enclosure. It seemed to provide stability, because I never had a problem with any of them. Does the LaCie enclosure have a built-in termination switch or do you plug in a terminator to the opposite SCSI port on the back? As for installing/using the 170 MB hard drive in the SE, it must have a jumper installed on its TE pins, if it's the last device connected to the SE's SCSI ribbon cable. Additionally, the HDD must have a unique SCSI address, The factory default is usually 0, which doesn't necessarily require a jumper. If another address is desired, a jumper or two installed across specific pins will accomplish that. If the LaCie enclosure had a switchable SCSI address button on the back (you change it by pressing in with a ball point pen), there were small wires from it that were connected to the drive's address pins in a specific way. Did you disconnect/re-connect these when you re-installed the drive in the enclosure? Also, if the enclosure has a termination switch, did you re-connect its wires to the drive's TE pins?