sad day for Q650

[ChristTrekker]

I finally had some free time last night, so I dug out the Q650 that's been in my garage for a year and tried to install A/UX on it. The booter went fine, it started to read from the CD fine, but it refused to recognize any of my hard drives. I went through a stack of 10 or so. I find it hard to believe that they all went bad on me. More likely there's something wrong with the Q650. But I'm not sure what to check. So that sucks...

 

[QuadSix50]

Oh bummer man. I'd hate to see my Quadra 650 to bite the dust in such a way.....'twould make me sad. :'(

Have you tried checking the SCSI cables along with any termination on the drives? Capacitors as well, maybe?

 

[ChristTrekker]

I'll have to see if I have spare SCSI ribbons anywhere. As the CDROM works fine, I don't think it's anything on the 'board. So if it's just one branch of the ribbon with a pinched off wire or something, I guess I could consider myself lucky.

 

[ChristTrekker]

Tried a different SCSI ribbon and had the same problem. I don't see any corroded/leaking components on the visible part of the mobo. Maybe I need to really take it apart and check the whole thing. I don't know what else it could be.

 

[Dennis Nedry]

If the CD-ROM is working, it sounds like nothing wrong with the actual Quadra 650. Sounds more like termination or hard drives needing to be formatted. They might not work if they're HFS+ or something. Why not check to see if they're showing up with Drive Setup or HD SC Setup?

 

[ChristTrekker]

If the CD-ROM is working, it sounds like nothing wrong with the actual Quadra 650. Sounds more like termination or hard drives needing to be formatted. They might not work if they're HFS+ or something. Why not check to see if they're showing up with Drive Setup or HD SC Setup?

I did that. They couldn't be seen at all. I went through 9 drives, most of which were pulls from Macs.

 

[LCGuy]

Have you tried the drives in another Mac since trying them in the Quadra? Remember, these drives are 10 - 20 years old - an extremely long lifespan for a hard drive. Since you've had success using a CD-ROM drive on that Mac, i'd wager that the Mac is fine, but that the drives may be shot, or as Dennis Nedry said, it could be an issue with termination or conflicting SCSI IDs. (that shouldn't be an issue, but remember that no SCSI peripheral should ever be set to ID 7, and to make sure that none of your HDDs have the same ID as the CD-ROM drive)

 

[porter]

I like the control panel "SCSI probe", tells you exactly what the mac can see.

Cables, termination, SCSI ids.

 

[luddite]

I finally had some free time last night, so I dug out the Q650 that's been in my garage for a year and tried to install A/UX on it. The booter went fine, it started to read from the CD fine, but it refused to recognize any of my hard drives. I went through a stack of 10 or so. I find it hard to believe that they all went bad on me. More likely there's something wrong with the Q650. But I'm not sure what to check. So that sucks...

I had the same problem trying to install NetBSD on my 575... the Mac-based installer wouldn't recognize anything, but booting the install kernel worked flawlessly. That was after formatting and partitioning with HDSC Setup (patched). I don't know if there's a similar option for A/UX though...

 

[billynomates]

You don't need A/UX to do this... Try booting from a system 7 floppy with the patched 7.3.5 disk setup you can get from varoius places around the net. If you can't find it, you can get the patch from http://lowendmac.com/sable/07/hd-sc-setup-7.3.5-patch.sit and apply it to the 7.3.5 HD SC setup you can download from Apple.

You can just about fit a system 7 system folder (without CD driver), and the disk setup utility on a 1.44MB floppy.

Update the hard disk driver in HD SC setup. I believe the one in this patched disk setup works with pretty much any SCSI hard disk...

Your drive should be there to partition in the A/UX setup - if it isn't - it's very probably hardware