mac startup ? can't find startup disc

[peterfitz]

My 7100/66 sometimes exhibits the following problem. Any clues what might be causing it ?

Occasionally I have to restart the Mac following a system crash or ProTools crash/freeze. When the Mac restarts I see an icon showing a question mark over a floppy disc icon.
The only solution is to powerdown the Mac and all peripherals, leave it for 2 minutes , then restart.

I'm concerned that this is pointing to a much more serious problem.

[Gary Stadler]

That little graphic happens as the Mac is searching all of it's possible sources for a bootable system. It searches all scsi busses, and then the floppy drive...if it doesn't find something that looks like bootable system somewhere, it'll stick with that icon. If you have a bootable system CDrom, the next time your computer gets stuck in that mode, feed it the CD. If it sees the CD and boots, then this means that your system hard drive is not being seen. If it does NOT boot from the CD, this possibly means that your scsi chain is not working properly. Look for the usual stuff, proper termination, correct scsi id's, etc .

This could also be a problem with the Mac itself, not resetting the scsi bus after a restart. Depending on what operating system you're running, you may be able to restart by hitting the 3 keys:
apple-control-power
all at once- this is the "hardest" reset availiable other than a power plug pull. I use it exclusively instead of hitting the reset button with the mouse- it clears all the registers and is a much more reliable reset...
...hate to say this, but what are you doing running protools on a 7100/66.....that's probably most of your problem right there....even an old used "anything" running 200+ megahertz would probably be loads more stable....when I moved up from a powercomputing power-100 to a 9600/350, with NO other changes- just stuck all of my old drives into the new computer and turned it on, my protools life instantly changed from 4-5 crashed per day to 1 crash per year.....maybe....