Mac SE/30 wants to constantly initialize ghost floppy

[smitty]

Hi all, 

I have a SE/30 that i've had for a while, 64mb, ethernet, etc.. Recapped it about a month ago and it was working fine.

Just last week I put in a SCSI2SD with a 4gb card, put on 7.5.5 and was in the process of copying over all my old zip disks contents to it.

So today i turn it on to play some Shanghai and i am greeted with the dialog "This disk is unreadable, do you want to initialize?"  I have not been using floppies with this system, and even weirder is that the dialog icon was specifically pointing to an external disk drive.  Clicking cancel just makes the dialog come back.  The system lets you get a click or 2 in between dialogs but is essentially unusable now. 

There is a FDD in the main bay, but i have never hooked up an external to it.  I dont plan on using floppies either, my collection is long gone and anything i need i can get online or off the zips.   Ive never seen this issue before, and i used to service these things at an Apple dealer back when they were still sold new.

Is there something to look for on the board?  What can i cut so it doesnt think an external fdd is hooked up? 

 

[Bolle]

Try to disconnect the internal floppy drive first and see if the problem goes away.

I had this exact same issue when on one of my SE/30s the internal drive cable was not fully seated on the back of the floppy drive.

So it's either that, your drive is broken or you have a broken trace somewhere on the logicboard. Not sure if a dead filter on the external floppy port can make it behave that way as well, but I guess it could.

 

[commodorejohn]

My first guess would be that the disk-present sensor on the drive is stuck.

 

[techknight]

Bourns filters are bad. Known issue if it shows up external drive. 

 

[smitty]

Ok so i disconnected the internal floppy at the motherboard.   "disk cannot be initialized because it is locked!"  over and over.  I was getting this message before also.  I am not seeing the external drive initialize dialog anymore though.

What are Bourns filters? 

 

[techknight]

It is a known issue for these machines. Any time you get phantom disk drives popping up wanting to be formatted, thats the cause of it. 

 

[smitty]

so... does anyone have a good source for these? already had 1 order get cancelled because they couldn't find stock from their supplier