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This week Ted Landau on MacFixIt has been intensively covering the blinking "?" after restarts (warm boots) on Alchemy motherboard systems (PowerBases, Performa 6360/6400's and UMAX C500/600's) with IDE hard drives which most have. We've both covered this issue since early this year and I noted about a week after Mac OS 8 came out that the problem returned with Mac OS 8. The only solutions (see my PowerBase Issues Page) that I, a proud owner of a PowerBase 180 with an IDE drive, have found are:

• Use Shut Down and Startup (cold boot) instead of Restart,
• Use MacOS 7.6.1 (both 7.6 and 8 exhibit the problem), or
• Make a SCSI external hard drive your Startup Disk.

I've done the latter (I needed greater storage space) and my startups are faster (no, it doesn't fix the ~30 second pre-startup delay). It seems to me that this is not just a Drive Setup problem. It could be a problem in the OS or firmware. Nevertheless, I fully agree with Ted that this is Apple's problem to fix. Its dreadful record of not fixing the problem seems inconceivable since it affects, discourages and frustrates users of entry-level Mac OS computers, whether from Apple or the Mac clones. This can only have a significantly deleterious effect on the desire to make a future Mac move-up purchase where there's more profit for Apple. The same is true for the annoying ~30 second pre-startup delay experienced on these same computers with Mac OS 7.6.1 and 8.