Best way to examine contents of old 50 pin SCSI hard drives?

[djorud]

A box of old 50 pin SCSI hard drives that I had in deep storage needs to be examined, or possibly disposed of. I counted 9 of them and do not know if they are functional or not. And, if they are functional, I am curious to know what was stored on them. These have been stored for twenty or more years. I am fortunate to once again have a fine SE/30 here to be used to assist in the process. But, I am needing some advice on the best way to connect them to the SE/30 for their examination.

Here is what I have tried unsuccessfully: I have a power supply 4 pin cable cable that can be connected in tandem with the SCSI drive in the SE/30. And, I have a 50 pin ribbon cable that can also be connected in tandem with the hard drive. When connected, I have the internal hard drive of the SE/30 as well as the old hard drive, now lying on the bench next to the SE/30 connected. After the cables were all connected, the SE/30 was switched on, but of course the question mark on a floppy drive Icon flashed on the monitor. I’m assuming it doesn’t know which drive to boot from, whether the internal or the old drive now externally located. Or, likely there’s more to it than that.

My next move is to simply disconnect the internal hard drive from the cable and leave the external connected, then switch the SE/30 on and see if it boots. At one time, it no doubt was the boot drive for an old Mac I had here, and a good chance exists there is an OS on it to boot from. This seems to be the logical step, as there would be only one HD available. Only issue with this solution would be that I cannot easily transfer files from the old hard drive (if it turns out to be functional) to the internal HD of the SE/30. I can envision an option would be to use floppies as an intermediate step in making any such file transfers.

If there is a preferred method of examining old 50 pin SCSI drives easily, please feel free to offer some suggestions, or otherwise some pointers on what I am planning to do next. Thanks much in advance!

 

[sstaylor]

You'll need to change the SCSI ID of one of the drives; typically the internal drive of an old mac is SCSI ID 0.
Some versions of Blue SCSI and ZuluSCSI have an initiator mode, which will make an image on its SD card of most SCSI drives attached to it.

 

[djorud]

The old hard drives are naked, not in an enclosure with an ID selector. I’m not knowledgable in how to change the SCSI ID. How do I change it? Never done it before on an SE/30 with OS 7.1. Preferences? Or do I need an application with the capability to do so?

 

[sstaylor]

There is typically three (or more, but you're usually just dealing with 3 for SCSI ID) sets of jumpers on the drive's circuit board. SCSI ID can be set by jumpering (?) in a binary-counting fashion: 000=0, 001=1, 010=2, 011=3 and so forth. Other jumpers might set things like termination. Some drives will have a diagram on the label if you're lucky.
The ID setting device on external cases, btw, just attaches a cable to those jumpers.

 

[chelseayr]

just to echo @sstaylor here, you know how ide drives have that one jumper to set cable/master/slave mode? well scsi drives generally use the same jumper concept to set their own id with .. so eg one jumper shortening pins 1-2 would be one id then 'sideway' 2-3 or next 3-4 pins instead would give you the next id etal etal .. of course you would maybe have to look up for any archived manual for your drives if they don't have a helping hint diagram labelled onto top of the hdd itself (alike to the lower-right part of this label: https://www.retropcstore.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/s-l1600-67-768x510.jpg ), because the jumper arrangement n possible scsi ids both often varied even from the same company

 

[zigzagjoe]

Another option, if you have one of @rabbitholecomputing 's zuluscsi devices: they have an initiator mode where it will take an image of attached drives, you could use that to copy the drives and then either view them on a computer or by using the zuluscsi normally.

 

[Juror22]

I do something similar when testing old SCSI drives, but I have the luxury of using a 6100 instead and it has a CD that I use to boot from, while plugging in each drive. If you cannot rig up something similar, then you need additional information on how to set each drive's SCSI ID.

because the jumper arrangement n possible scsi ids both often varied even from the same company

There are other options out there (possibly) but this https://stason.org is my goto for practically all the various brands/styles of SCSI drives.
They have quite a lot, to search in one spot and you can get the location for the SCSI ID settings from the numerous, assorted diagrams.

 

[djorud]

Thanks to everyone for the great suggestions related to SCSI ID issues. My take on this is I would be replicating what an external drive within an enclosure would do. After posting my last reply, I went back to the SE/30 that still had the internal and bare external scsi hard drives s connected simultaneously using the cables which had 3 ends on them. I disconnected the internal hard from them, leaving just the one external hard drive. Turned the SE/30 on and it booted fine using the long dormant hard drive. Next, shut down followed by connecting an external SCSI hard drive in an enclosure to the rear SCSI jack, it being a M2115 that I had connected to a Color Classic. To clarify, there were now two hard drives hooked to the SE/30: one to the internal 50 pin jack and the second being an external hard drive in its own enclosure connected to the SE/30 via the rear SCSI port.

Next was to turn on the SE/30…..and it booted fine from the old hard drive as well as having the external drive show up on the desktop. So far, so good. Next step was to copy those files I wished to keep which were on the hard drive tethered to the internal SCSI port, over to the external hard drive. That worked, too. Once I had the files copied over to the external drive, shutdown and repeat the process for seven more old SCSI drives. Took about an hour to copy all the files I wished from the old hard drives over to the external drive.

I failed to mention that the SE/30 case was removed to allow the extra long 18” extension SCSI cable from the internal port to reach the old hard drive(s) which were sitting on the bench. Probably understood by most, but for any novices like myself reading this, that was the first step before doing anything else.

Had I prior experience in jumpering the old hard drives, I would not have needed to employ the enclosed hard drive. But, the desired outcome of being able to open the old drives and copy from them what I wanted to keep was reached anyway. There remain some applications on the old drives which were too large for the external hard drive, so they are being saved for another time when I can procure another larger external hard drive to store them on.