Combo drive causes boot failure

How do you fix an iBook that will not boot from hard drive when the combo drive is plugged in to the logic board? If the drive cable is unplugged, the iBook will boot from the hard drive when connected to the firewire port. It will also boot from the logic board if the combo drive is unplugged. Is the problem the optical drive? Is it the cable? Is it the logic board?
The computer functions perfctly with the optcal drive removed.
G3 iBook 800mhz Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Quote
Originally posted by whelmond
I have tried almost everything, nothing seems to work, I am trying to flash my BIOS.. but I don't know how.. (no FDD, and a NTFS filesystem..)
If you have the solution, please post it!!
last time I flased my BIOS I`ve done so from a Bootable cd
just created a Floppy image with dos and the BIOS image on it and set it as the Bootable image for the CD

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[SOLVED] CD Drive causing boot problems

I'm trying to install Arch, but booting the install disk causes these errors to come up:
Loading /arch/x86_64/vmlinuz.....
Loading /arch/x86_64/archiso.img.............ready.
Decompressing Linux... Parsing ELF... done.
Booting the kernel.
: : Starting udevd...
done.
: : Running Hook [udev]
: : Triggering uevents...[ 19.934456] usb 5-1.6: device descriptor read/64, error -110
[ 35.098044] usb 5-1.6: device descriptor read/64, error -110
[ 36.869505] ata8.00: exception Emask 0x52 SAct 0x0 SErr 0xffffffff action 0xe frozen
[ 36.869549] ata8: SError: { RecovData RecovComm UnrecovData Persist Proto HostInt PHYRdyChg PHYInt CommWake 10B8B Dispar BadCRC Handshk LinkSeq TrStaTrns UnrecFIS DevExch }
[ 36.869598] ata8.0: failed command: IDENTIFY PACKET DEVICE
[ 36.869639] ata8.0: cmd a1/00:01:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 tag 0 pio 512 in
[ 36.869640] res 40/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00 Emask 0x56 (ATA bus error)
[ 36.869721] ata 8.0: status: { DRDY }
It just stops there and won't continue to boot. Disconnecting the SATA cable from my CD drive and using a flash drive to boot fixes these issues, but I didn't continue with the install because I wasn't sure if I would be unable to boot with the drive plugged in later. This is my CD drive. It's connected to a SATA 6GB/s port on my motherboard. The drive works perfectly in Windows.
Also, if anyone knows anything about the USB error, help would be appreciated. That was the only error that did not go away after disconnecting my CD drive. I only have a keyboard, mouse, and WiFi dongle plugged in.
Last edited by nigh (2012-05-29 09:28:01)

Your issue with the SATA disc drive is a problem with Udev. Namely that some SATA disc drives do not support 16-byte pass-through commands coming from Udev. See this post for a longer explanation and the correct workaround:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=895404
Other guides online will say to comment out parts of Udev's 60-persistent-storage.rules file, but I have found that to not only not work, but mess up detection of the SATA hard drives.
So, after, or during, Arch installation using your USB stick:
Add
options libata atapi_passthru16=0
to /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf
Add
FILES="/etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf"
to /etc/mkinitcpio.conf
Rebuild kernel image with:
mkinitcpio -p linux
reboot
To narrow down your USB issue, maybe you could try booting with only one plugged in at a time to identify which one has the issue. Do they all three work even though one gives this message?

After 10.5.6, external drives cause boot to hang

When I boot my iMac, it hangs with the grey apple on a white screen of I have external firewire drives attached. It never gets to the point where the little gear starts revolving. When I unplug the drives, the boot goes to completion.
After booting, I can use any number of external firewire drives with no problems. All of my drives have passed Disk Utility checks.
I have several firewire 400 and one firewire 800 drive, all cause the same problem. I have tried resetting the firmware, which doesn't help.

Sorry, my posting indicated in the section below about my machine, that I use 10.5.5, but I use 10.5.6.

Firewire external drive causes internet failure on iMac 2.8 GHz

I am connected to the internet via wireless connection, which shows a strong signal. When I connect my external Lacie HD, I receive a failure notice when when I open any browser. Signal strength is still strong, but the network, internet and logon fails. I have reset and purged the caches, etc, but no luck. Creating a new connection does not help either. The one sure fix: eject the HD, disconnect it, and open the browser again. Bingo; I'm on. What gives? Anyone have an idea why or what would cause this? It took a while to make the association, but the drive is the culprit undoubtedly.

Hi elkaboom-
Greetings and welcome to the Apple boards.
If the drive has an external power supply brick those have been known to go bad. it is hard to diagnose because the blue light comes on and the drive sounds like it is working.
When the supply goes bad it causes all kinds f problems. This is the first time I have heard of this symptom though I still believe this may be your culprit.
If the drive is under warranty LaCie will replace the supply at no charge. If it is out of warranty you can purchase a supply directly from them for around $20.
Luck-
-DaddyPaycheck

[SOLVED] systemd & separate /boot causing boot failure

I'm working on moving to systemd, and I'm having a boot issue. I don't think my setup is particularly peculiar, but essentially: I have 2 disks, sda and sdb. sda contains some windows partitions, and /dev/sda4 is my data/homedir partition. /dev/sdb holds my arch install:
/dev/sda4 - /home (btrfs) (no label)
/dev/sdb1 - /boot (ext2) label=arch-boot
/dev/sdb2 - swap label=arch-swap
/dev/sdb3 - / (btrfs) label=arch-root
I have the expected entries in /etc/fstab:
UUID=XXXX / btrfs default 0 1
UUID=XXXX /boot ext2 defaults 0 1
UUID=XXXX /home btrfs defaults,relatime,ssd 0 1
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/dev/sdb3 on /media/arch-root type btrfs
/dev/sdb1 on /media/arch-boot type ext4
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as well as the "fstab versions":
/dev/sdb3 on / type btrfs
/dev/sda4 on /home type btrfs
Notably, the "fstab version" of /boot is missing. During boot, the 'boot.mount' unit fails, with:
mount: /dev/sdb1 is already mounted or /boot busy
mount: /dev/sdb1 is already mounted on /media/arch-boot
And bootup stops. Manually invoking "mount /boot" fails with the same error. I see the "automount" unit:
$ systemctl|grep boot.mount
boot.mount load failed failed /boot
media-arch\x2dboot.mount load active mounted /media/arch-boot
So, I can then issue:
$ systemctl stop 'media-arch\x2dboot.mount'
$ systemctl start 'boot.mount'
Which does successfully unmount the "automount" version, and mount the "fstab version", and I can then exit the emergency shell and boot normally. However, I am unable to issue, say "systemctl disable 'media-arch\x2dboot.mount'"; I simply get a complaint of "Failed to issue method call: No such file or directory." This probably makes sense, and comes down to a misunderstanding on my part between units, services, targets, etc.
I'm assuming it's *not* expected that we just allow all devices to be automounted (i.e. just remove my /boot entry from fstab)? How can I mark these entries as "do not automatically create mount points under /media"? Or, alternatively, make sure the fstab entries are loaded first, obviating the need for the automount? I'm guessing I'm missing something obvious here as I doubt this is a strange setup, but unfortunately I haven't had much google success when my search criteria are "systemd" and "/boot"...
Last edited by nogoma (2012-08-16 14:10:34)

So, this was actually not systemd related, as I discovered when I booted under initscripts again. Essentially, I had an overly general rule in /etc/udev/rules.d that was causing the automount behavior; restricting the matching devices to my non-boot disks fixed the issue.

USB Drive causes Boot Freeze

I added a new 3T external USB drive and my Mac freezes on bootup if the drive is on. Anyone know how to fix this?

Check: Apple / System Preferences / Startup Disk to verify that your Mac OS X disk is selected to startup from.
Try ejecting and turning off the External HD before shutting down the iMac. Then in reverse, startup the iMac and then turn on the External HD.
Alternatly: if there is bootable volume on the External HD that you want to boot from, turn on the External HD and then Startup the iMac in Startup Manager.
see > Startup Manager: How to select a startup volume

PB G4 Combo Drive Writer intermittant failure

Hi-
Using Toast 6 (have successfully for some time now) my writen CD's (data) fail to verify, although they mount. The problem started last night, after an intensive burning session (6 disks in a row). This morning, after an all night shutdown, verification still fails.
After the first year of ownership, I had the drive replaced due to a writing problem. This one has worked fine for years. DVD's play fine. CD's boot, I have restarted, let the machine cool, reset PMU, restarted Toast.
I watch alot of Netflix DVD's on the road and am wondering if the lens might be dirty. I am due for a new machine, so I don't want to replace the drive just because it won't write. Currently it's the only wat I have to burn archival CD's
Any suggestions? TIA

Many people find the ifixit.com online repair guides worth looking at.
If the drive worked again after the cleaning (after it had stopped working before that), and if you're going to write off the drive anyway, you may want to try giving it a manual cleaning. I remember at least one person who posted that actually opening up the drive and doing a manual cleaning of the lense/s was the only thing that worked for him. Not for the faint of heart though.

Gray screen of death ... macbook boot failure

Three weeks old and getting the gray screen of death. Power up works but MacBook just keeps trying to read a video disk I left in the ROM drive. Gray screen with nothing else (no processing circle, no apple logo, just a plain gray screen). I could hear the rom drive cycling.
I worked with support via telephone and their solutions failed also:
1. power up, hold down the eject button (nada)
2. power up, hold down the mouse button (nada)
3. power up, hold down the apple key, the cntl key, the P and the R keys for two chimes (got the two chimes but nada)
Now it chimes when i start up but still sits there cycling the cdrom which has a movie disk in it.
The support rep asked me if there was a small extraction hole by the drive. HELLO: are you really Apple ??? On the new macbook?
The MacBook was delivered with 10.4.8. Wanting the large 10.4.9 update on CD for any future need, I downloaded the 10.4.9 intel combined update (larger than the other choice) and went with that not knowing which to use. However this was three weeks ago and the computer has been perfect. my session yesterday was perfect but I did 'brag' on the new macbook when a friend saw me using it. why does bragging cause boot failures? Murphy?/??????// HELP.
Black MacBook intel core 2 duo 120gb drive 2 gb memory Mac OS X (10.4.9)

My apologies to everyone if I raised an alarm. The hardware (i.e. the MacBook) is fine and the problem was that I am a new user. I have to say that Apple Support was unprepared to address the issue but I did resolve it myself by accident. Here is the resolution:
I looked up the SMC reset instructions on the Apple Support site as a next step and the instructions said to try 3 things before doing the SMC:
1. Force Quit (Option - Command - Escape)
2. Restart (Control - Command - Power)
3. Force Shutdown (hold down pwr button for 10 seconds
As a new user I could not know that the key with the Apple was the Command key, but I guessed since the words control and option were called out, it had to be the Apple key with the Squiggle.
I did each step but nada. I did get a different alert tone (lower pitch) after doing step 3. Each time I turned the computer off.
I then started over and tried again turning on the macbook from being off each time. I did step 1 and turned the machine off and then did step 2 and the computer came alive.
The system is just like I left it and the rom drive works fine. Again, my apologies to all you macbook users for raising any alarms. We are new to using Apple and have much to learn. I did not have any cheat sheets to work from so it took time. Many thanks for the responses.
Black MacBook purchased in March 2007 Mac OS X (10.4.9) I love this MacBook

Sudden total boot failure. Any idea what would cause this??

Today I was adding more apps to my clean install (on an external drive) and I had to go back to my original "update" installation to get a password off Keychain (I did not migrate). After I got the pw, I shutdown and my Powerbook would not reboot! I got the chime and then utter blackness. No disk access was attempted on my external, nothing from internal drive, and still nothing when I tried the Leopard installation DVD.
I kept trying and finally (after 10-15 minutes of getting nothing except the initial startup sound) the screen lit up and I got to the Startup Manager disk selection. I was still unable to boot from the DVD; the boot sequence had progressed only part way and then totally stalled (I gave it about 3 times as long as it would normally take to boot from a CD or DVD). I tried this twice more so I thought I had suffered catastrophic hardware failure.
But, then, after a pram reset, I was able to restart into single-user mode and did a couple of the fsck's (file-system check in Unix) and it said the internal disk was OK both times. Got through login and to the Finder Desktop after a regular boot, and after a safe boot, but found that the Finder was corrupted and repeatedly crashed with almost everything I tried to do.
Reluctantly then tried to boot from external drive and found that - it worked!
Tried to fix internal drive unsuccessfully. Eventually found that DVD drive was working again too, so I did a Time Machine restore of the internal drive after booting from the Leopard install disk.
After getting the internal drive to boot again (Time Machine worked!!), the Wacom tablet driver immediately crashed (even though I had supposedly loaded a Leopard-compatible version), so I then went to Terminal and got rid of all the StartupItems and PreferencePanes in the root Library and my user Library. I tried rebooting and since it did so without issue this time, I hooked up Time Machine and made a new backup.
How did the total boot failure get caused? I had never seen anything like this before where the screen stayed totally black and not even the DVD would boot.
I am now back to "normal" after 7 hours. Moral of the story is that even when your computer looks completely dead, keep trying. I just hope it doesn't happen again, since I'm not sure what the issue was.

Faulty battery. Make Genius reservation and take this iPhone back.

Hi, I have a hard disk failure so to recover my data I am using disk utility to restore the data on an external drive while booting from a second external hard drive. When I perform the operation it gives me an input/output error and stops. Any tips?

Hi, I have a hard disk failure so to recover my data I am using disk utility to restore the data on an external drive while booting from a second external hard drive. When I perform the operation and after having selected both my destination and source drives, the operation begins but soon fails due to input/output error. If I try to create an image of the drive it gives me the same error message. Any help would be much appreciated.

Disk Utility only creates a image of the drive, so it's no help getting exactly what you want, which is your files. If the file structure is messed up or the drive is failing then it's no help.
If you have a external boot drive and you can't access the internal non-booting drive though the typical Finder and windows to transfer your files via drag and drop methods, then you need to install Data Rescue on the external boot drive and it will do as best as it can to recover your files. (works on non-encrypted/non-Filevaulted drives only)
.Create a data recovery/undelete external boot drive
Are you sure you have hard drive failure, or that OS X isn't merely not booting?
Because if the drive is working physically, then there is a host of fixes
..Step by Step to fix your Mac
https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro?view=documents#/

Boot drive causes screen errors on other Macs - but not mine...?

Due to a recent accident, my MBP's 160 gig hard drive was damaged and is now unusable. (I was backed up, that's not the issue.) I've since been using a 100 gig, 2.5 inch external drive (which I erased and formatted for use with Intel Macs) as a boot drive but it's close to full, and now that I don't have any major projects at hand, I'd like to send the MBP in for repair. The problem is, when using the external drive to boot other Macs (my Mini at work, my girlfriend's MacBook) the display is all mixed up - some parts are visible, others aren't. I can recognize certain icons from my desktop and Dock, for example - but everything's scattered all over the screen, and any kind of motion - dragging, hiding and showing the dock, opening windows - causes "ghosting" and "trails". There seems to be no way I can use the drive on other computers while I wait for my laptop to be repaired. Why does it only work on my MBP, is it something in the way I formatted it? (GUID partition scheme, SMART status, etc.)
:/

I'm surprised by this just because I booted another Mac from an external drive with a clone of my system for a couple of weeks under similar circumstances and the Macs were not especially similar. G4 PowerBook which came with Tiger pre-installed and the machine-specific disks vs. G3 eMac which had come with Panther. I would have thought that MBP vs. MB would be, if anything, much less problematic than PB vs. eMac. I wonder how common such problems are.
I assume you've played with Display preferences etc.? Presumably, you use an external monitor with the mini. Do you know if drivers are available for that which you might be able to install. (I don't expect this is the problem but you might want to check just in case.)
- cfr

[PT880] SATA boot failure without old IDE (non boot!) drive

Aaaaargh.
I go to all the trouble of installing my new sata HD, getting it to work, getting it to boot, copying all my stuff from the old drive -
And now, as soon as I yank the old IDE drive, the new drive refuses to boot. I get a "boot failure" message. To boot, I have to have the old drive plugged in. I'm not booting from the IDE. In fact, once the boot process begins I can actually unplug the old drive and everything works fine. But the system staunchly refuses to boot unless it can hold hands with its old drive.
I went into bios and checked the boot sequence - only the new drive is in the sequence. Everything else I can think of checks OK. I've got the latest bios.
Any ideas out there??
Mike Gray

Quote from: Maesus on 15-April-06, 16:15:14
bootfailure? did you fdisk your new drive and set an active partition to it? Otherwise the new drive can't boot without an active partition.
Ugh. No, I hadn't fdisked. In over 20 years using (and tinkering with) computers I've never actually upgraded a hard disk before, and I hadn't even realized it. So I had things a bit messed up: the old partition was still labeled as "active" and "system," the new as "boot." At just for a little variety, I thought I would remedy the problem by simply setting the new to "active" in disk management and rebooting.
Can anyone guess what happened? Vewy scawy.
Anyway, after a hair-raising two hours messing around in the recovery console, I have got everything straightened out. And learned some new things about the terms "active," "system" and "boot" in the process.

What causes CD's played in combo drive through iTunes to skip?

When I play an audio CD in my eMac combo drive through iTunes, just about every disc I play skips? When I play them on my home stereo CD player or my DVD player in audio mode they all play fine. What could be causing this?

Hey Matt,
Some of my CD's have slight surface flaws, but the oversampling by the combo drive should take care of that. It does in my video DVD-in-audio-mode player and in my home stereo CD player which does 4x oversampling.
Songs in iTunes do not skip. The skipping is also not the "Max Headroom" type of digital stuh-tuh-tuh-tuttering. It is more like the audio intermittently cutting in and out.
I did some more troubleshooting and discovered that part of the problem was a loose connector. The 3.5mm plug from my external speaker system was not making good contact with the audio out port on my Mac.
The other part of the problem I discovered was that in one of the CD's I was listening to the recording has a sampled vinyl LP in it. The original LP had slightly audible surface scratches on it, and the original analog tape studio recording had dropouts in it. It just sounds real different when played on my Mac through my Klipsch speakers. Here's to that old audio engineering trick where the recording studio mixdown is done through Yamaha studio monitors with the idea that if the engineer can make Yamaha studio monitors sound good, the recording will sound good on everything else. The audio engineer on the Cinematic Orchestra CD titled Every Day apparently didn't use Yamaha nearfield studio monitors
After jiggling the audio connector, Genesis' Selling England by the Pound sounds fantastic once again. Thanks for your input, it helped point me in the right direction. I'll also try cleaning the contacts on my Mac's audio out port with some contact cleaner.
Thanks,
John

Combo drive failure: Ejects all discs

While watching a very scratched DVD, the combo drive on my month-old Mac Mini began making very loud noises; after that the film skipped and froze. After a few minutes of disturbingly loud knocking and clicking noises, I turned the computer off by pressing the power button. After restart, I ejected the disc by moving it to the trash icon in the dock. Now the combo drive refuses to read any other disc that I put in: DVD, music, or data. It makes spinning sounds and then ejects them after about 10 seconds.
Everything else is still working fine. Is the combo drive dead or is there a fix I can attempt at home?
Thanks in advance for your help.

Welcome to Apple Discussions!
It is possible that the drive has been damaged, in which case if it can't read the correct track of an inserted disk, it will automatically eject it. The fact the drive pulls the disk in and spins it up at all suggests the drive is otherwise functional, thus tending to indicate the lens is at fault.
You might first try a PMU/SMC reset (depending on whether yours is a PPC or Intel mini. This would be the first step if you were getting errors re failure to calibrate power when trying to write to a blank, and I would not have much confidence of it working in this situation since it seems unlikely to be a controller issue, but it's worth trying. Instructions are below - PMU if it's a PPC and SMC if it's an Intel.
If that doesn't help, try a lens cleaner. That has been known to help in these situations.
Ultimately, if the system is no longer under warranty, you would be better I think to get an external firewire drive than replace the internal. It would be much the same price and tend to give better performance!

Boot from Lacie FireWire Combo Drive?

I am waiting for my newly purchased "Snow iMac" to arrive and have run into some problems. I have checked on the Apple website and to my knowing i'm getting the Summer 2001 model. On the specification sheet i looked at on the Apple website it says that my model will have a CD-RW Combo type drive (reads cd's and dvd's and burns cd's). However on the item description i got on eBay - i bought the iMac on eBay - it says it only has a CD-ROM drive! In the worst case scenario it would turn up and have a CD-ROM drive, and i only have Tiger on a DVD. I do have a Lacie FireWire drive that reads DVD's would i be able to boot from it with the Tiger dvd and install Tiger that way?
Thanks, Joe.

Joe,I'm glad you went with that other iMac Snow - saves on worrying about the RAM upgrade for a bit - and was cheaper in the end!
On the specification sheet i looked at on the Apple website it says that my model will have a CD-RW Combo type drive (reads cd's and dvd's and burns cd's). However on the item description i got on eBay - i bought the iMac on eBay - it says it only has a CD-ROM drive!
Here are the iMac specs: Low End Mac. No iMac G3 Slot Loader had a combo drive from new. The later ones had CD-RW drives which do not read DVDs. The Snow either has a DVD-ROM (500MHz) or a CD-RW (600MHz) so unless someone's been tinkering you're getting a CD-RW.
But you should be able to use the external FW drive just fine.
regards
mrtotes

Combo drive causes boot failure

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