Bank does not exist!.....????

[pulse_divider]

Hi all,
I'm new here, first post.
I just picked up an EIII yesterday off my local Craigslist. It's a 6083 model (this means 8 megs, right?) and seems to have been babied, it looks like new.
The seller told me that the internal drive (a 500 meg that was installed years ago to replace the original) was acting up but that it loaded samples fine via the ancient external MicroNet/Syquest drive (turns out not to be the case, see below). We loaded some samples into it and played them, and I took it home.
Today I had some time to poke around at it and am finding the following:
---needs floppy to boot, if floppy isn't in it continuously cycles thru looking for SCSI drives. If I pop the floppy (containing OS 2.42) in it boots fine
---once booted, it finds the internal drive as disk 3 and loads the banks fine from it. I assume this means the OS is not installed on the hard drive. It won't recognize the Syquest but it's missing a terminator and the case says it's unterminated, so I've ordered one.
---here's the problem... when a bank from the internal drive is loaded, it plays fine but won't let me do anything to it other than functions found in the purple section (like Transpose, Supermode, Load, Save). If I try to open the Master, Sequencer, Dig or Analog Processing sections it gives me a "WARNING: Bank does not exist!" message. I can successfully load a bank, play the samples and save it as another bank with a different number on the drive, but can't edit anything about the samples or patches. I can't even get into the disk utility in the master section. The last bank on the disk seems to crash the unit, as it infinitely stays in "loading" mode and never loads, forcing a reboot. Does this mean the HD is corrupt?

I'm guessing this means that I'll have to pull the drive and see if I can access these functions without the drive installed. Does anyone have any ideas? Once the SCSI terminator gets here I can try the Syquest again and see if those banks load and function properly. Some of the Syquest banks are loaded on the HD but some are absent, which makes me wonder if the HD didn't get interrupted when originally copying samples from the Syquest.
Anyway, this is all conjecture based on available info I could find, so I'd greatly appreciate an expert opinion if anyone has it!
Thanks.

[midipuppies]

Sounds like the O.S. is missing/corrupt on the HD. If the HD termination was an issue, I don't think the system would see it at all.
Can you format the HD and re-install the O.S. to it from floppy? (Remember to set the HD to boot when done)
The system needs the O.S. to access modules.
If it is corrupt on the HD, it might cause these problems. Hope that helps, and welcome.

[pulse_divider]

Thanks.
The termination only is an issue on the external Syquest drive, as the case has a label that clearly states it requires termination and doesn't have one. I've disconnected it for now, I just thought that once I got it up and running I might be able to successfully edit banks loaded from it. At least this would provide a useful control factor that would rule out a larger problem.
I can't reformat the hard drive because I can't get into the Master section, it gives me the error message.

[pulse_divider]

Just checking back to see if anyone has some advice on this.

I got a SCSI terminator for the Syquest drive and it still won't recognize it on the SCSI bus. It's possible the drive is bad, though.

It's booting from the floppy and mounting the internal drive, it will load banks from the internal drive but still give the "Bank does not exist!" error when trying to access any other pages (Master, Dig processing, Analog processing, Sequencer, etc) other than the main purple numerical area.

I might have an old Zip drive somewhere that I can try and hook up, perhaps I could try and mount it and copy the banks off the hard drive? Any other advice? If I were to get a new internal drive, would I be able to format it considering I can't get into the master menu?
Thanks.

[dr.c]

Hi...


The disk should NEVER be on SCSI 3 because its the usual reserved channel for backups for Macs (Syquests, CD-Roms, etc...
Choose another.

Reformat your disk, install a software, and BEFORE DOING ANYTHING ELSE after the software is installed, save a bank, just save a bank and don't get on my ass !
If you don't do this, the directory is not created and you will never find a bank when you restart the machine.

Let me know waht happens...

[pulse_divider]

Thanks for the advice.
Is there a way to switch the internal HD SCSI ID via hardware jumpers?
I can't reformat the disk because I cannot access the Master menu, I get the error message.
The only thing I can think of is to pull the existing HD, buy a new HD, mount it internally and see if I can format it. Then hook the original HD up via external SCSI (I'd have to get an enclosure for it) and see if I can copy the banks back over to the new internal disk. There are some really nice sounds in there and I'd hate to lose them, but if gets my EIII fully working I could sacrifice the drive.
I'm asking so many questions because I can't wrap my head around how to solve this with no access to the Master menu/disk utilities on the EIII.