Mac Bottom HDD?

[techknight]

I have a Mac Bottom HDD that i picked up. I took it apart.

it appears to have an MFM HDD inside, Microscience drive.

But strangest thing of all, it has a 9 pin serial port. Then a DB9 to modern mac serial adapter.

Anyone seen one of these? just says model MACBOTTOM

 

[Scott Baret]

Haven't seen one, but I believe serial hard drives were commonplace prior to the Plus. I think there's a common perception that the majority of drives used the floppy port since Apple's HD20 did, but many third party drives seemed to use serial ports. General Computer, of course, also made the HyperDrive, which you'd install inside the Mac.

There were plenty of great names for those old drives--I've heard of MacBottom. I also have seen MacCrate.

 

[techknight]

Yea, trying to find a driver though is going to be next to impossible, if not impossible. But im curious whats locked away inside this drive, so i might have to reverse the firmware just to build some kind of interface. uses the 8530 SCC IC, judging by what info is available to it, it shouldnt be too hard to disassemble and pick out the serial interface handler.

Supposidly the old Symantec program supports these drives, but probably not without a driver.

 

[waynestewart]

In the 128/512 days Apple told developers that they to use the serial port for hard drives and everyone followed their advice. After all they were the experts. Of course when their engineers went to make one they knew that the floppy port was hugely faster and used that.

 

[Mac128]

I feel your pain.

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3919

I have even been in touch with the guy who wrote the driver, and even he doesn't have a copy anymore.

I have set up a website in hopes that someone will stumble across it and send me the driver. Came close once.

 

[techknight]

Well now that I own one, it gives me incentive to try and write something that will at least "access" the drive. I dont know how to write a driver, but i can talk to a serial port ;-) futurebasic here I come.

So once i decipher the drive algorithms, then at least i could make something that would at least image the drive. That way it could be opened in an HFS or MFS viewer of some sorts.

 

[techknight]

I did fire the HDD up today, and the drive appears to pass the seek test. (appears to.) it spins up, stepper motor moves around a little bit, and the green light on the drive itself comes on, along with the red one.

 

[techknight]

Here is an inside pic of it incase anyone was curious.

 

[Mac128]

Yup. That's what mine looks like, except I have a Miniscribe drive from 1987.

This is the site I set up, which may give you a bit more perspective on the device as there is so little information on the web otherwise. To date I have received one response from it, yielding the SCSI version of the driver software, which I was not able to extract anything useable for the serial model. This was verified by the original driver designer, who could honestly not remember what he wrote them for 25 years ago.

Http://MacBottom.com

 

[techknight]

Does the original designer even remember a portion of the protocol? i would hate to have to reverse engineer the ROM.

what would be funny is if the HDD had a system folder or an image that has the driver. LOL. I thought about pulling the HDD and hooking it to a controller card , but the LLF is specific to the controller, so i would have to get a controller card with the same IC as the one in the MacBottom.

 

[techknight]

Yea, mine is a 20mb microscience drive btw, Also I think I am going to pull the EPROM and take it to work with me, dump it and run it through IDA and see what i come up with. I'm not too familiar with the low-levels of the 68k architecture, but i sure can learn. I do AVR real well. I guess i can learn that too.

 

[Classic Mac]

I have one in my sale ad:

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=15846

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=16141

 

[Mac128]

I have one in my sale ad:

Naw that's the SCSI model. Completely incompatible with the original serial model being discussed here. I do have all the software for the SCSI model.

 

[Juror22]

I found this in comp.sys.mac from 1996:

> We have the following items for sale. Both are in original packing and in

> excellent working condition.

> 1. MacBottom 20 MB Serial Hard Drive. Originally paid over $1000.00 when

> bought it new in 1986. Will sell for best offer. Made to sit underneath

> Mac 512 or MacPlus neatly.

> 2. Apple 400K External Floppy Drive. Will sell for best offer.

> For more info: Please contact: krazy...@kjl.com

It was in a post, quoting the original that was from Kevin "KrazyKev" Jay Lipsitz. Maybe try to get a hold of Kevin and see if he knows who he sold it to, way back then.

I'm guessing that you may have already found this, since it turned up pretty quickly, but I thought that I would suggest it anyway.