Portable Hard Drive

[bunnspecial]

I'm afraid that I've come to the conclusion that the original 20mb Conner in my Portable is dead. It will spin up, but the computer doesn't see it.

I'd thought it would be simple just to drop a 3.5" desktop drive in it, but after I looked at it I realized that's not going to be the case.

Is the connector the same as is used in 2.5" SCSIs, or is it something else proprietary?

And, in either case, aside from a 2.5" drive, are there any other solutions for a replacement drive? I have one spare 2.5" drive, but I had it earmarked for a PB100(although the Portable certainly gets preference).

Thanks.

 

[Macdrone]

nope its proprietary but uniserver made a cable to use regular desktop drives or scsi2sd units in it.  check ebay as he was selling them there last i looked.

 

[bibilit]

Yes, you can hack a hard drive cable to connect a regular drive

 

[AlpineRaven]

I have done a few portables I do tend to find conner hard drives pretty good, well I have 6 of them designed for Portables and others as well such as from Mac LCs etc... If you have donor 50pin conner hard drive same as what Portable uses, you could put it in early Macintosh to re-format it.

I obtained an Macintosh Portable about 4 months ago, previous owner said he tried to format it and couldnt classified as "dead" I took it out, swapped the board over and put it in Macintosh SE and formatted it then went back in Portable - works fine.

Other option is to modify 36 pin to 50pin SCSI to put normal spinner in or SCSI2SD in.

You cant use PowerBook's 2.5" SCSI hard drive - its completely different.

Cheers

AP

 

[bibilit]

36 pin

34 IIRC

 

[AlpineRaven]

34 IIRC

you're right its 34pin - cant keep up!

 

[bigmessowires]

Adapter for Mac Portable hard drive: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Macintosh-Portable-34-to-50-pin-SCSI-Hard-drive-Adapter/311739336309

 

[nvdeynde]

I replaced the portable's original CP3040 connor HDD with the desktop version Conner CP3045. 
Just keep the PCB of the Mac portable's CP3040 hard drive and swap the rest. 

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Good one, thanks for that tidbit. [] ]'>

I really like Alaska's PCB, very nice.

 

[bunnspecial]

Very nice on swapping the boards-I'll hunt down one and go with that option.

My experience with swapping PCBs on newer HDDs isn't so good. I inadvertently blew a surface mount fuse a year or two ago on a 100gb 7200 RPM Toshiba laptop HDD and needed to get some data off it. I bought an identical drive on Ebay(not an easy thing to find) and swapped the boards and even though the drive would spin up it wouldn't read.

Fortunately I came out okay with that one. I've since been told that swapping boards can scramble the data, but I got away with it. I ended up tracking the problem to the fuse(I didn't know when I first started had issues with the drive). The correct value of the fuse was 2A. I pulled out my CRC and looked up fuse values for copper wire, dug through my wire box and miced individual strands of wire until I found one close, soldered it in place, then to finish it off put a "nick" in the wire with my pocket knife to give a fusible location that SHOULD be about 2A. I'd intended to retire the drive, but it's actually now sitting in the 867mhz TiBook that's on semi-permanent loan to my dad to play Civ II .