New SE and Miniscribe deep-dive

[davidg5678]

For a bit more reliability, you could try adding a drop of oil to the bearings on the drive's stepper motor. This could have been what needed to get broken in when you first received it. I recently saw a video detailing this process on a similar hard disk, and it looked fairly promising. These huge physical drives definitely make some great noises while they are operating!

 

[PB145B]

9 hours ago, davidg5678 said:

For a bit more reliability, you could try adding a drop of oil to the bearings on the drive's stepper motor. This could have been what needed to get broken in when you first received it. I recently saw a video detailing this process on a similar hard disk, and it looked fairly promising. These huge physical drives definitely make some great noises while they are operating!

Yep, my Miniscribe had that same issue. Although it sound really bad before, while this Rodime is smooth as butter, so I think I’ll leave it be since it’s working for now, but I’ll definitely oil it if any problems arise.

Yes, the sounds these drives make are incredible. All the brands had their own unique sound. This Rodime is actually very quiet, while the Miniscribes are LOUD.

I did do another test of it after it cooled down and it still booted right into System 7.0.1 just fine! So I’m ready to throw it in the SE now, but that may be tomorrow before I get around to that.

I really can’t believe it works now. A damn Rodime. I’m so happy. I’ve wanted an RO652 for ages, so this is kind of a dream come true for me!  

 

[Franklinstein]

I bought a couple RO652s a while back in the hopes of using their HDAs to recover a dead HD20 (I think the HD20's drive model is RO552 or something: same HDA, different PCB). There was also a RO752, apparently, but I don't know what its interface or capacity were. The RO352 was a 10MB MFM drive, so their naming convention is weird.

I notice you also have a Sony SRD series drive there. Does yours work? I got one a while ago and it worked for about a week (once I unstuck the spindle motor, that is) and then decided it had had enough and now won't do anything at all.

Apparently there were a few other members of the SRD family including an 80 and possibly 120MB or larger drives but Apple never used them (for obvious reason: they aren't good). These later models may not have been sold outside of Japan due to the whole Quantum litigation. No great loss.

 

[PB145B]

I bought a couple RO652s a while back in the hopes of using their HDAs to recover a dead HD20 (I think the HD20's drive model is RO552 or something: same HDA, different PCB). There was also a RO752, apparently, but I don't know what its interface or capacity were. The RO352 was a 10MB MFM drive, so their naming convention is weird.

I notice you also have a Sony SRD series drive there. Does yours work? I got one a while ago and it worked for about a week (once I unstuck the spindle motor, that is) and then decided it had had enough and now won't do anything at all.

Apparently there were a few other members of the SRD family including an 80 and possibly 120MB or larger drives but Apple never used them (for obvious reason: they aren't good). These later models may not have been sold outside of Japan due to the whole Quantum litigation. No great loss.

Were you able to use them in the HD20 successfully?

I may have spoke too soon for the Rodime. It is giving me lots of trouble, and half of the programs I copied to it today won't launch. Already got it installed in the Mac SE and everything. I'm a teeny bit pissed. I really thought this thing was working. I may try oiling the stepper motor, but I don't think that's the issue here, as it sounds fine and doesn't star have errors until it get to the middle of the disk, so the stepper is likely fine. To makes things even better, some files on the original Miniscribe got corrupted today too, so I have reformatted it as well.

That Sony drive gets really bad stiction if it sits for very long, just like wonderfully shitty 80MB Quantum ProDrive in my newer SE/30, so I consider it junk. I think it does work once it's unstuck, but it's too much hassle to keep it unstuck.

Not sure what I'm going to do about the hard drive situation in the SE right now, but I need a break and some rest or there's gonna be a hard drive shaped hole in the wall...

 

[PB145B]

Okay, I think I have found something that works. I reformatted the Rodime, then scanned it with Norton Disk Doctor while it was empty, so I think it was able to mark-off the bad spots.

I copied all of my stuff back to it and it didn’t give a single write error! Progress! And this time there was only one application that didn’t open after copying, which was Norton Disk Doctor ironically. However, I simply copied it back to the drive from my Zip disk, and now it opens just fine, as do all of the other apps on the drive now, so it’s much better than it was yesterday.

I also put the Miniscribe in an external enclosure, so I have 40MB of 100% vintage storage on my SE!  
 

This Rodime sound really good. It’s much quieter than the Miniscribe, and makes a much “friendlier” and softer sound when seeking than the obnoxious sound the Miniscribe does. I love the sound of the Miniscribe though. It’s loud and mean!

 

[Franklinstein]

I haven't been able to test my HD20 resurrection scheme just yet since I don't have access to any of it currently. It's not going anywhere though so it'll be available when I get the time.

The Rodime drives were not exactly renowned for their reliability, which is part of the reason Rodime didn't end up with a huge share of the market. I only liked them because they're Scottish. Anyway they rebranded or sold out and became Calluna or something and made type III PC Card hard drives for a while before leaving the disk drive market entirely.

I don't know if those old drives have any sectors to spare anymore or if they're just having to mark bad blocks in the file table. Is there a good utility that does that? I have a couple drives with persistent bad sectors that everything (including NDD) keeps attempting to spare out but they always end up causing problems in the same sectors again. I just want to tell HFS or HFS+ to NOT USE THOSE SECTORS! AVOID! NOT GOOD AREA! HERE BE DRAGONS! Floppy disks do that during format. Why won't a hard drive? Instead they just keep clicking and clicking over and over until eventually something gets tired and throws an error. There are a couple drives with bad sectors concentrated at one end of the drive or the other so those are easy to partition around but otherwise good 1GB drives or so are unusable because there's about 1MB worth of bad sectors in the middle of the drive.

 

[PB145B]

@Franklinstein ah, ok. Can’t wait to see how that turns out when you get the chance to mess with it! 
 

Yeah, I knew the Rodimes weren’t know for good reliability. I too think it’s pretty cool that they were Scottish. You don’t see a lot of computer-related tech from there it seems. They did invent the 3.5” hard drive form factor, which is one of the reasons I really like them. 
 

I believe Norton Disk Doctor was able to mark the sectors off to not be used, as there was a few hundred more kilobytes of used space on the drive after I scanned it. However it wasn’t able to do this with data in those spots, so I scanned it while it was blank the second time.

Also, here’s a video of it running in the SE!

I had the external drive off here, so you can here just the Rodime. That SCSI enclosure you can see is the one I put the Miniscribe that was originally in this SE into.

System 7.0.1 would probably boot quicker with a faster drive, but I’m not bothered by it. 

 

[PB145B]

Also, here’s an inside-shot of the SE with the Rodime installed:



You can always identify a Rodime from the bottom. The big, silver stepper-motor is always the giveaway. 
 

Now to find an analog board with the old squirrel-cage/cross-flow fan and this’ll be done (just the fan itself would do, but I don’t anticipate finding one on its own). I’ll also recap the A/B and PSU eventually.

 

[GregorHouse]

Incredible! Good Job. just took my old 20 MB Miniscribe, which would not spin up any more, did, what you did, and now I can write to it. The FWB stopped half way through low level format like you describe with an error (actually just a stop sign hand and OK) but I could create a partition and copy system 7.1 to it. Only thing is, when I boot, the stepper motor make a noise like moving forward/backward for a minute or more and then the drive ist not mounted. I can mount it with FWB manually and then it is fully operational but it takes this noise time off, when the SCSI bus ist initiated. So obviously I cannot boot from it.

Hmm, still some stepper motor misalignment?

I have the exact same problem, when turning on it keeps making this click-click forward-backward noise for a couple minutes, and then stops. I've been able to format and even read and write succesfully using Silverlining, but won't mount without it, so I can't boot from it. Did you solve something?



View attachment IMG_6275.MOV

 

[GregorHouse]

Incredible! Good Job. just took my old 20 MB Miniscribe, which would not spin up any more, did, what you did, and now I can write to it. The FWB stopped half way through low level format like you describe with an error (actually just a stop sign hand and OK) but I could create a partition and copy system 7.1 to it. Only thing is, when I boot, the stepper motor make a noise like moving forward/backward for a minute or more and then the drive ist not mounted. I can mount it with FWB manually and then it is fully operational but it takes this noise time off, when the SCSI bus ist initiated. So obviously I cannot boot from it.

Hmm, still some stepper motor misalignment?

I have the exact same problem, when turning on it keeps making this click-click forward-backward noise for a couple minutes, and then stops. I've been able to format and even read and write succesfully using Silverlining, but won't mount without it, so I can't boot from it. Did you solve something?

 

[PB145B]

Hmm, that’s interesting. Not really sure what would be causing that, unfortunately.

 

[Bendix]

No, sorry, I could not solve it because the next day my drive was dead again, most likely because the heads were magnetically „glued“ to the disk and the motor is to weak to spin the drive up. There is no practical fix for this I guess. 

 

[GregorHouse]

I didn't want to hoard this thread with an extended explanation, so I wrote a new one. If someone could give me any tips I'd appreciate, thanks!

 

[GregorHouse]

Here you go!

View attachment 34658

I can't get it to work, what am I missing? The Mac doesn't look at it as an application at all, it tries to fins an application to open it as a document

 

[PB145B]

I can't get it to work, what am I missing? The Mac doesn't look at it as an application at all, it tries to fins an application to open it as a document

Did you unzip it? The program is zipped.

 

[GregorHouse]

Yes I did. Doesn't matter, I found it elsewhere. Thanks!

 

[PB145B]

Yes I did. Doesn't matter, I found it elsewhere. Thanks!

That’s odd. Not sure why it doesn’t work. At least you found another copy!

 

[CC_333]

I can't get it to work, what am I missing? The Mac doesn't look at it as an application at all, it tries to fins an application to open it as a document

I think this can happen if either the type/creator info or resource fork gets mangled.  It probably happened somehow when it got zipped.

c

 

[PB145B]

I think this can happen if either the type/creator info or resource fork gets mangled.  It probably happened somehow when it got zipped.

c

That could be it. Probably should have used a vintage Mac and Stuffit instead.  

 

[GregorHouse]

I think this can happen if either the type/creator info or resource fork gets mangled.  It probably happened somehow when it got zipped.

c

It's the most likely, I remember a thread or a manual in The Macintosh Repository explaining how to encapsule old software using Stuffit and then ZIP to avoid this problems