So I just got a NeXTstation Turbo Color that looks like as if the hard drive was wiped clean.
This is what the boot screen shows:
CPU MC68040 33MHz, memory 70 nS
Ethernet address 0:0:f:1:55:d
Memory size 48MB
Testing The FPU, SCC, SCSI, Enet, RTC, Timer, Event Counter, Sound Out
Starting Extended Self Test
Extended SCSI Test
System test passed
Boot command: sd
boot sd(0,0,0)
booting SCSI target 0, lun 0
blk0 boot: sd()sdmach
Booting from SCSI target 0 lun 0
sdmach: not found
load failed
blk0 boot:
So I inserted the NeXT boot floppy that I made from the image in the archive here and enter "fd(0)" at the prompt. The drive starts reading but then complains that it can't read the disk:
blk0 boot: fd(0)
unknown binary
load failed
blk0 boot:
So today I went and bought an external SCSI CD drive and tried to boot directly from the original NeXTSTEP 3.3 installation CD - with nearly the same result:
blk0 boot: sd(1)
Waiting for drive to come ready ...
unknown binary format
load failed
blk0 boot:
This starts looking like a hardware issue. Has anybody an idea what could be wrong? Is there still someone around who could repair original NeXT hardware?
Found it!
It was the old hard drive. After I put a new one in (Seagate Barracuda 4lp 2GB) it installed just fine.
Haven't yet found what's wrong with the old drive. It's a Seagate ST1480N and so far I wasn't able to find a decent datasheet.
Also I don't understand why it wouldn't want to boot from floppy before ...