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Macintosh Classic always bombs when formatting SCSI drive

Bolacore

Active member
I recently got my Macintosh Classic up and going again after recapping (analogue + logic). It passes the Apple Personal Diagnostics tests on the long RAM test, logic board test, and floppy test. It has it's original 40MB SCSI drive, and already had Sys 7.0.1 on it that worked just fine. I wanted to reinstall it fresh with Sys 7.1, so I started up Disk Tools from the Sys 7.1 disk set, and ran Initialize on Apple HD SC Setup. It ran for about a minute, and then bombed with an illegal instruction error. Every time I now try I get the same issue, and can't format the drive. I've tried with Disk Tools from 6.0.8, 7.0, 7.1, and 7.5.3, all fail with generally the same error a minute in. I've also tried Lido 7 which also fails with an illegal instruction. 

Not sure what to do now, as I can't understand why it keeps bombing on me. Is the issue with the drive, or is something else possibly at fault here? Thanks in advance for the help

 
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Bolacore

Active member
Just to update, I finally found one program that seemed to work: SCSI Specialist. Initialised the drive, and I can now install Sys 7.1 without issue. No idea why the others didn't work

 

LaPorta

Well-known member
That is odd. What were you using to start from to format the drive? I’d almost think that the HD itself was going or something.

 

Bolacore

Active member
That is odd. What were you using to start from to format the drive? I’d almost think that the HD itself was going or something.
What do you mean? The drive passed the test in Apple Personal Diagnostics, as well as the bad block test. May very well be going bad though, it is from 1990 after all. I have a SCSI2SD showing up sometime soon, so will probably switch to that at some point. 

 
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