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Macintosh SE internal SCSI power but no read

appleg33k85

Active member
Good Morning - I have a Macintosh SE that I recently acquired, it has a 40MB Apple Quantum drive, when powered on, the disk spins but does not attempt to read. I opened the drive and made sure that the head isn't stuck and fixed the sticky head stops (they weren't very sticky but still worked on them anyway to ensure it wasn't an issue). I also purchased a Blue SCSI which powers on when connected but also does not attempt to read. Unfortunately for my troubleshooting purposes, I don't have another computer that is SCSI capable (at least not a desktop, I have a Powermac 180 that works). The computer reads and boots from a floppy but says no SCSI device present when trying to use a detection utility.

The motherboard is fairly clean, the battery was still intact (now removed) and I don't see any leaking capacitors. I feel like I have a bit too many variables for troubleshooting but was hoping I could start here and it might be something with the motherboard before purchasing any additional equipment.
 

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joshc

Well-known member
Firstly, looks like you're new here, so welcome! :)

I would start with looking at the BlueSCSI configuration. What steps did you take to set it up? What is on the BlueSCSI? It won't boot from it unless it is set up correctly.

There is a possibility that your SE board has a bad SCSI chip (I've had this before) but we should eliminate everything else first.
 

appleg33k85

Active member
Firstly, looks like you're new here, so welcome! :)

I would start with looking at the BlueSCSI configuration. What steps did you take to set it up? What is on the BlueSCSI? It won't boot from it unless it is set up correctly.

There is a possibility that your SE board has a bad SCSI chip (I've had this before) but we should eliminate everything else first.
Thanks for the welcome! I walked through the steps on the gethub wiki, i used a premade image , I tried a few, they were named HD00_512.hda or HD10_512.hda , looking through the log that was saved on the SD card it had that the card initialized and had the two columns with the names placed under 0 (sorry for the bad description, i'm not at home right now with the log), there was only the power light that was on, if I removed the SD card it blinked.

I did recently read that the BlueSCSI isn't compatible with some SE Macs so I'm wondering if it could be that too. I should have gone through the compatibility but I just saw it as a low cost solution to the SCSI2SD.

Thanks for taking the time to help troubleshoot.
 

joshc

Well-known member
I haven't checked for a while but I think those pre-made images still need formatting, as in, there isn't a sufficient driver until you format with a utility like Lido, FWB HDT, Silverlining or FormatterOne Pro (those are just the ones I have used, there are many utilities for formatting a drive on a Mac).

I tend to use SCSI Probe to check what is being recognised on the SCSI bus, the device should show up there even before it's formatted.

You'll need to boot from a boot floppy, or have a FloppyEmu spare, in order to actually format/partition the BlueSCSI on your SE with one of those aforementioned utilities. One that's done, then you can install system software on it.
 
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