snuci
Well-known member
I acquired two 512K Macintoshes with HyperDrives in this Conquest thread but the later HyperDrive 20 unit needs work so I'm creating a thread to help document what I'm doing.
The original 512k Mac that he HyperDrive 20 came in had a leaky battery and I needed to deal with some rust/corrosion issues. The analog board, as a result, suffered. When I took it apart, I cleaned the floppy drive because it was so stuck, it wouldn't even injest a floppy. After a good cleaning, I reinstalled the floppy drive (it's not as easy as a non-HyperDrive because of the extra electronics) and fired it up. The floppy drive didn't spin up when I inserted a floppy. I took an external sloppy drive and plugged it in. When I did so and tried to boot with that, the computer did not start up and I had some twitching random patterns on the screen.
In addition to this, I noticed that the hard drive produced a flashing LED pattern that indicated an error. I got two errors, in total and decided to spin around the stepper motor. It was firmly in place but moving it around freed it up. I could hear the drive spinning, so that was not an issue. After several hard boots, the drive mostly comes up with the drive LED on and staying on. Once or twice I got the drive LED to flicker once and extinquish which, I think, is what it should be doing. Since it would not boot from the hard drive and I couldn't boot from a floppy disk, I had no option but to transplant the electronics to another Mac 512k.
I transplanted the HyperDrive 20 parts including the hard drive power supply, the old motherboard with HyperDrive daughterboard, the hard drive and associated electronics and got the Mac 512k running. I was a little worried because I had read that the analog board in these HyperDrive Macs were then tweaked for voltage and adjusted because of the additional power supply. The new Mac 512k fired right up with no visible issues. I had even plugged in a second floppy drive which I would assume would take extra power but this worked well too. I had the system disk and the HyperDrive drivers disk in separate drives.
The HyperDrive drivers disk has a utility called "Manager V3R1". This looks like it will format a HyperDrive disk but I'm not sure if it will from a drive that needs to be low-level formatted. When I run it, it pops up a dialog that says "Needs to run on a HyperDrive system" or something similar, and then exits when you click OK. I tried this on my other HyperDrive. When I run it, it adds an additional option to the default menu to manipulate drawers. Of course, I didn't try any of the options but I did boot this computer from the same floppy that I booted the other system and used the HyperDriver driver disk as well so that all things were equal.
So now I'm left with two options. Either the daughterboard is not working properly or the hard drive is bad or needs some form of low-level format perhaps. After some research, it looks like Symantec Utilities for Macintosh (SUM) version 1.1 might help? From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Utilities#v1.1 it states it supports HyperDrive disks. I'm not sure if it does formatting but it's worth a shot if I can find it. I tried Mac Garden but couldn't find that version. SUM II was there but not 1.1. If anyone has any pointers to this version, I'd like to, at least, try it.
Since the HyperDrive utilties don't see the drive (or maybe the daughtercard), I'm wondering if the drive needs to be pre-formatted for them to see it. Since the formatting utility doesn't work I guess I could low-level format it in a PC but I'm not sure if that will make it work in the Mac or cause more damage. If the drives were the same in the two HyperDrives, I could attach the new disk to the old HyperDrive but the old one has a 10mb drive as opposed to the 20mb and I would assume the drive geometry is hard coded into the card,
Sadly, this is not a run-of-the-mill question because of it's scarcity. Does anyone else know where I might ask about this issue? Any help is always appreciated. I will check the daughterboard tonight and take it from there.
The original 512k Mac that he HyperDrive 20 came in had a leaky battery and I needed to deal with some rust/corrosion issues. The analog board, as a result, suffered. When I took it apart, I cleaned the floppy drive because it was so stuck, it wouldn't even injest a floppy. After a good cleaning, I reinstalled the floppy drive (it's not as easy as a non-HyperDrive because of the extra electronics) and fired it up. The floppy drive didn't spin up when I inserted a floppy. I took an external sloppy drive and plugged it in. When I did so and tried to boot with that, the computer did not start up and I had some twitching random patterns on the screen.
In addition to this, I noticed that the hard drive produced a flashing LED pattern that indicated an error. I got two errors, in total and decided to spin around the stepper motor. It was firmly in place but moving it around freed it up. I could hear the drive spinning, so that was not an issue. After several hard boots, the drive mostly comes up with the drive LED on and staying on. Once or twice I got the drive LED to flicker once and extinquish which, I think, is what it should be doing. Since it would not boot from the hard drive and I couldn't boot from a floppy disk, I had no option but to transplant the electronics to another Mac 512k.
I transplanted the HyperDrive 20 parts including the hard drive power supply, the old motherboard with HyperDrive daughterboard, the hard drive and associated electronics and got the Mac 512k running. I was a little worried because I had read that the analog board in these HyperDrive Macs were then tweaked for voltage and adjusted because of the additional power supply. The new Mac 512k fired right up with no visible issues. I had even plugged in a second floppy drive which I would assume would take extra power but this worked well too. I had the system disk and the HyperDrive drivers disk in separate drives.
The HyperDrive drivers disk has a utility called "Manager V3R1". This looks like it will format a HyperDrive disk but I'm not sure if it will from a drive that needs to be low-level formatted. When I run it, it pops up a dialog that says "Needs to run on a HyperDrive system" or something similar, and then exits when you click OK. I tried this on my other HyperDrive. When I run it, it adds an additional option to the default menu to manipulate drawers. Of course, I didn't try any of the options but I did boot this computer from the same floppy that I booted the other system and used the HyperDriver driver disk as well so that all things were equal.
So now I'm left with two options. Either the daughterboard is not working properly or the hard drive is bad or needs some form of low-level format perhaps. After some research, it looks like Symantec Utilities for Macintosh (SUM) version 1.1 might help? From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Utilities#v1.1 it states it supports HyperDrive disks. I'm not sure if it does formatting but it's worth a shot if I can find it. I tried Mac Garden but couldn't find that version. SUM II was there but not 1.1. If anyone has any pointers to this version, I'd like to, at least, try it.
Since the HyperDrive utilties don't see the drive (or maybe the daughtercard), I'm wondering if the drive needs to be pre-formatted for them to see it. Since the formatting utility doesn't work I guess I could low-level format it in a PC but I'm not sure if that will make it work in the Mac or cause more damage. If the drives were the same in the two HyperDrives, I could attach the new disk to the old HyperDrive but the old one has a 10mb drive as opposed to the 20mb and I would assume the drive geometry is hard coded into the card,
Sadly, this is not a run-of-the-mill question because of it's scarcity. Does anyone else know where I might ask about this issue? Any help is always appreciated. I will check the daughterboard tonight and take it from there.
