I posted on the Apple discussions section and have had little luck with advice: plenty of suggestions, but none that seem to come from a person with my hardware and experience with my type of problem.
in a nutshell: just got a lovely Quadra 700 and wanted to put the same 1.2 GB drive on it that is perfectly at home in all of my compacts. I get persistent boot problems as a result. At first I made too many upgrades at the same time (adding VRAM, a network card AND the bigger hard drive all at once) but when I scaled back and just added the drive first it would not initialize with OS 7.6 disk tools, then it would initialize with OS 8.1 HD Set up. it even installed OS 8.1, but the second I put MS word (5.1 if that matters) the boot problems kicked in again (bus error, try booting with extensions off blah blah blah...) if I restart from that bomb screen (with extenstions off or on) it boots up. I thought it might have something to do with the external CD drive I have connected. I was reading anything I could get my hands on and I found an Apple Developers note that said there are problems with external SCSI devices sometimes. Do I need to "double-terminate" or something? Love this machine and its 16 inch screen, but what can I do with a 80 MB hard drive?
Any Q700 owners have any ideas what's up with my little guy?