Lisa Widget Hard Drive Issues

[gubbish]

Hi..

Got a Mac XL a few weeks ago that I'm in the process of reverting to a Lisa 2/10.

Mostly the system is working fine, except for the Widget hard drive.

Currently it has Macworks XL on it.

Maybe 65% of the time, it boots up without any problem and goes into Macworks.

But on occasion, it won't boot properly. The chunk sound of the HD brake does occur, but it sounds like the drive is spinning up and down, so there will be a rising pitch and then a falling pitch, like it is turning on and off, slowing down and speeding up.

But it's inconsistent. Sometimes it will start right up, sometimes not.

I can try adjusting the HD brake to the proper distance, which is detailed in Larry Pina's book. But it does sound like the solenoid is working, so I'm not sure what's going on. I may spring for a XProfile card, but would like to diagnose this problem first. Any ideas? Thanks!

 

[gubbish]

Also wanted to mention that when the HD is doing it's speed up/slow down thing, it will eventually spin down completely, after which there is a faint high pitched whine that is audible for a short time, then fades away. Just another piece of information..

 

[H3NRY]

I'm not familiar with the Lisa Widget drive, but a lot of drives of that era had head stiction problems. The heads would stick to the platters when stopped, usually at the edges of the working surface where the heads sweep the lubricant. Though the brakes release, the disk fails to spin because the heads are stuck in deep gooey lube. The rising and falling pitch is the motor start circuit pulsing the motor coils at various frequencies to try to break it loose. A close listen, or if you can see the brake drum, will tell whether the disk is actually spinning or not. If the disk is actually spinning up and slowing down, the drive is having problems reading the sync signal embedded in the data tracks. In either case, there's not much you can do about it without access to a clean room and a good supply of spare parts.

One thing you can check is the power supply voltage. If 5V or 12V is off by more than a half Volt or so, that could cause flaky operation. Hope you can get that Lisa going.

 

[gubbish]

Thanks H3NRY, I will check the voltages and make sure everything seems normal. I'm feeling a dark cloud approaching for this particular widget drive though.. Seems like there aren't many working ones out there.

I'm interested in the IDEfile project which emulates a profile drive and uses IDE for storage, or the X/Profile which is the easiest solution but is pricey.

I also saw a reference in Larry Pina's book which caught my eye -

it mentioned a hard drive upgrade for a Lisa which used a Miniscribe 20Meg drive, which it specifically mentioned as the OEM drive that came with the Mac SE.

That seems strange to me since as far as I know the drive in an SE is SCSI. Has anyone heard anything about this?

Thanks..