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Weird Asante en/sc ethernet adaptor issue with Classic II

deckardbr

Member
Joined
May 12, 2013
Messages
17
I recently obtained an Asante En/SC ethernet Adaptor for my Classic II which is running 7.0.1 with 4 mb of ram.

Heres what happened

1. Powered on adaptor and then mac. Starts up to disk with a question mark! Usually it would start up to my harddrive. Removing the adaptor resulted in a good startup so the mac was fine.
2. The adaptor has two 25 pin scsi ports. Tried the other one and got a smiley face mac then crash.
3. Powered on the mac then the adaptor. This worked better but after installing the Asante Ethernet drivers from its Installer program, received immediate system crash saying "System Bus error. Reboot without extensions". Rebooting without extensions still resulted in immediate crash for bus error. I had to reinstall System 7.

So very frustrating but interesting. I'm wondering if its the scsi port causing havoc or maybe in order to use the adaptor I really need 7.5 which has all the drivers built in for the most part (I think). I had mactcp in the control panel.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
 
I recently obtained an Asante En/SC ethernet Adaptor for my Classic II which is running 7.0.1 with 4 mb of ram.

Heres what happened

1. Powered on adaptor and then mac. Starts up to disk with a question mark! Usually it would start up to my harddrive. Removing the adaptor resulted in a good startup so the mac was fine.
2. The adaptor has two 25 pin scsi ports. Tried the other one and got a smiley face mac then crash.
3. Powered on the mac then the adaptor. This worked better but after installing the Asante Ethernet drivers from its Installer program, received immediate system crash saying "System Bus error. Reboot without extensions". Rebooting without extensions still resulted in immediate crash for bus error. I had to reinstall System 7.

So very frustrating but interesting. I'm wondering if its the scsi port causing havoc or maybe in order to use the adaptor I really need 7.5 which has all the drivers built in for the most part (I think). I had mactcp in the control panel.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Sounds like the SCSI ID and or Termination are not set correctly if its preventing bootup, make sure SCSI ID on the EN/SC is not conflicting with the hard drive, or any other SCSI devices, and then set termination appropriate for your SCSI chain (either via termination setting or an external terminator on the last device).
 
Setting the SCSI ID helped and I was able to at least get a smiley face and then Welcome To Macintosh. It then gave an immediate Bus error or Address error. I tried all the different termination settings with most giving me the bus error and a few the startup disk question mark. I don't have any of the drivers installed yet, just trying to see if it can boot to desktop.

My MacTCP has Local Talk only, no ethernet option. I downloaded one of the mactcp files from the internet but they only leave me with the local talk option. How would I add the ethernet option to MacTCP? I wonder if I did so manually I would no longer get the bus error on startup?
 
I managed to get a Dyna Port SCSI to ethernet adapter working on a Mac Plus running system 6.08, so system 7 shouldn't be a problem. From memory all I needed was MacTCP and the Dayna Port drivers installed. Sounds like the SCSI id of your adapter may be conflicting with something else still. I recall I had to mess around with SCSI id's to get everything running right, as the Plus also has an external HD. I would try setting the id on the SC/EN to the last id in the chain.

Not sure if it helps because it's to do with system 6 not 7, but here's a link to a site I used for many of the network utilities:

http://www.jagshouse.com/internet_on_system_6.html

Here's a page with drivers for various nic's, there's a number of different Asante drivers there and one there for the Asante EN/SC:

http://www.macdrivermuseum.net/network.html

Here's my Mac Plus page:

http://www.tkconsulting.com.au/Vintagecomputerprojects/MacintoshPlusProject/tabid/413/Default.aspx
 
Last edited:
Found it was the scsi cable that was causing the bus error. It was a recently purchased one. I had an old scsi that i used with a preference harddrive and tried that one. Worked perfectly and after installing network drivers I was able to get online!

It was a real thrill to see the webpage come up on macweb. Thanks for all your help!
 
Found it was the scsi cable that was causing the bus error. It was a recently purchased one. I had an old scsi that i used with a preference harddrive and tried that one. Worked perfectly and after installing network drivers I was able to get online!

It was a real thrill to see the webpage come up on macweb. Thanks for all your help!

Bad cables and Termination errors are the bane of SCSI, lol
 
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