Retrieving data from a non-ethernet SE/30

[kevred9]

After finding this forum, I decided to pull my apparently quite rare(*) SE/30 from it's Targus bag in my basement. Amazingly, the PRAM battery was still intact and no capacitor leakage was present. I then hooked it up to an old 17" crt and powered it on with no sound problems. It booted into System 7.5.5 just as I left it. Wow! Already wasted a few hours playing some of the games still installed. Ah, the memories of college...

Anyway, does anyone have any tips on how to best transfer some old data off of the internal scsi drive? Are floppies my only hope? (I'd have to find a PC with a floppy drive)

I thought I had a scsi ethernet adapter, but I haven't found that yet... I do have an old 28.8k external modem for the mac, but long since abandoned any dial-up account. I might have a working PC scsi card, but not sure what could be used to read the drive directly.

Anyone had this dilemma have any advice on other options?

And yes, I may eventually be selling this, provided I can find someone who will love it as much as I did. However, I'm not interested in parting it out!

(*) my SE/30 was originally upgraded from an SE, then enhanced with a cpu socketed 33MHz Daystar PowerCache 030, then further enhanced with a Lapis ProColorServer 8.16 video card - even found the original packaging for both the Daystar and Lapis boards!

 

[mcdermd]

That is quite rare. Do you have any other Macs which may have a serial port that you can connect to the SE/30 via localtalk?

 

[stretch]

Local talk to another local talk mac is a good option albeit slow.

Another option is an external SCSI drive. I have an external drive enclosure that I've used up to a 700MB drive on my SE. You'd need a second machine with an external SCSI connector to copy from the external drive.

The last option I can think of is to remove the hard drive and daisy-chain it in another machine. Find a SCSI cable with three connectors and a 'Y' power cable. Don't forget to set the SCSI jumpers correctly.

 

[IamSpartacus]

I've never heard of this 8.16 card for the se/30. Is it accelerated? Could you post pictures of the box/manuals?

 

[kevred9]

Unfortunately this SE/30 is my only remaining Macintosh, so LocalTalk isn't an option. I used to administrate a large Macintosh lab years ago. We even had LocalTalk to ethernet bridges setup (I think they were called Gatorboxes.) Sadly I don't have access to any of that hardware anymore...

I'll probably either attempt to mount the drive on a PC with a scsi card or resort to floppies.

Anyone ever serially connected a mac and a pc? (Would be slow, but there isn't a whole lot of data involved.)

Here is a screenshot of speedometer tests. Similar in performance to a IIfx. A "Snooper" 8-bit video benchmark shows it is 48% the speed of a Quadra 900 internal video...

I'll see if I can get some scans of the Lapis manual...

 

[kevred9]

Forgot to add the board pics:

 

[billynomates]

I tried an Asante Talk ethernet to localtalk bridge for a while, but was completely unsuccessful getting it working.

I do think perhaps it was a client configuration problem, so it may work with some more expertise.

I remember the Asante documentation not being too detailed!

 

[Mk.558]

Your choices could also be a SCSI - Ethernet bridge, or LocalTalk to Ethernet.

If you were close by I would either LocalTalk the machines together and use mine for Ethernet out, or lend you my ethernet PDS card. Acquiring one should be a priority. Don't forget the connection guide stickied in this section.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Serial Mac to Serial PC works fine with a crossover cable, I've done it, run a terminal program on both and you should be able to transfer your files . . .

. . . who really cares how long such a transfer takes?

IIRC, you can do modem to modem the same way with the proper cable pinout, but I've never done that. If you have access to two phone lines or a friend or a pair of friends with wired telephones, you can use the modems do do a ZTerm x-fer directly, circumventing the need for a dialup account.

My favorite cross-platform and cross generational Mac option is the ZIP Drive, I think I paid about $3 ea. for three USB versions at thrifts. I still have my two original drives from their first release. That's probably the easiest SneakerNet solution available, unless you have a SCSI CD Burner.

I've got two or three extra SE/30/IIsi EtherNet Cards if you want to borrow one, but finding a pair of ZIP drives and a disk would cost less, or ever so slightly more, than shipping the card both ways. Since you might have a PC SCSI Card, you should only need one SCSI ZIP. They also came in parallel port configuration, IIRC.

 

[kevred9]

Had forgot about zip drives! I seem to remember having one connected to the se/30 at some point. Time to dig deeper into the pile of parts in the basement.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

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[stretch]

Check out this site. There's a ton on info on exactly what you're trying to do. There's pinouts and connector descriptions as well.

http://www.ccadams.org/se/serial.html

 

[techknight]

One thing i did years ago, was build a mac to PC null-modem type cable, and setup a mac emulator on the PC, such as basilisk II as a localtalk appletalk server, and used the SE as a localtalk client, and it worked fine. the SE would see the basilisk II setup in chooser.