I am not expecting help, I am too angry to think about that right now, so I am mostly just complaining at this stage!
There is this running "joke" with me that I spend weeks setting up a Mac and getting it just perfectly how I like it. But then, once I come back to it later to do some actual work - it is completely borked. Well - it has happened to me yet again, for like the fourth time in a row. I have some seriously crap luck.
The MDD/FW800 was running great, my dream OS 9 machine, which I'd fire up every month or so over the past year, usually sorting through my mess of files looking for something. I had not been working on my music for a while.
So this weekend I found a stash of three ATA drives which I knew I used as backups on my Power Macs and decided to see what was on them. So I connected them each to the FW800 33MHz bus and booted, examining the contents of the drives, making a list and labeling each drive for future reference.
But I missed the box, and had been mulling over some music ideas, so tried starting it yesterday to do some work. And suddenly it doesn't boot. I get a few freezes during boot, and then the dreaded Open Firmware error "invalid memory access at %SRR0". I had two 512MB sticks of RAM which have worked for a while, and it won't boot with either of them anymore. How/why would swapping out some drives in the media bay wreck both sticks of RAM?
So far I have removed all other peripheral cards. And I will try to be methodical about analyzing this. But right now it is so stressful. I am completely broke now and am stuck with whatever solutions I can devise with what I have here, and I am not very hopeful. Last night I was completely flipping out because I could not get ANY of my OS 9 systems to boot. I have three PowerBooks and one PSU - guess what? Suddenly the power supply is toast, so I can't use any of those. My TiBook now boots with digital noise for a display, suggesting that a flex cable in the hinges is broken. And my 8600 boots, but without activating the ATI card output so that I can actually see anything. I have two 15-pin Apple monitor adaptors, but I haven't used them for yonks and can't find them. It was a lame night, indeed. Fortunately, my 8600 is now booting with the monitor, so at least I can use that.
AAAIIIIEEEE!!!!!!!