SE/30 System 6 can't initialize hard drive

[modulusshift]

I have an SE/30 with no hard drive (courtesy of jupo on these forums, whom I can't speak highly enough of), and a Quantum Fireball TM 2110s from an external SCSI enclosure. It seemed like a good match to me, so I installed it in the SE/30. I'm running off the System Startup disk from 6.0.8, and the Apple HD SC Setup copy on there didn't recognize it. So I grabbed the patched Apple HD SC Setup that's floating around, and dropped that on the floppy. That recognized the drive just fine, so I tried to initialize it, and it fails every time. The test button passes the drive successfully, but initializing fails with either an "unable to verify format" after about a minute, or a "unable to write to drive" after at least 15 minutes. I'm lost as to what to do here, and the troubleshooting for this is very sparse online.

The computer does need recapping, it already has only very faint audio and occasionally wavy video on the right side, but there doesn't seem to be anything going wrong during this initializing process. Any thoughts, anyone?

 

[SE30_Neal]

I confess to not knowing that drive but fo have an external on my SE/30 and had to assign the number in the scsi chain and have a terminal or other device afterwards before it worked

 

[modulusshift]

It's simplified for internal hard drives. You know how an external SCSI drive can use numbers 1-6? An internal hard drive automatically gets 0, just like the Mac automatically gets 7. And the Mac handles the termination, too. Thanks for your help, though.

 

[SE30_Neal]

Oh sorry I couldn’t help. someone on here should be able to give you guidance.

neal

 

[joethezombie]

No, an internal drive has jumpers to select the ID.  Usually they are set for 0, but there is nothing automatic about it.  The internal drive must be terminated.  Most drives have the terminator packs installed on the drive, but check your drive to be sure.  Some have a jumper that set termination.

EDIT: Maybe try LIDO or FWB Toolkit to prepare the drive.

 

[modulusshift]

Okay, good to know! I know that the external casing it was in before could select the SCSI ID, and a trace of Silverlining from the last Mac to use this drive showed that it was recognized as 0 when installed internally, so I just assumed it was automatic. What really confuses me is that the label for this drive shows jumper positions to put it in master, slave, or cable select mode. If I'm not mistaken, that's IDE-only, right? But this is certainly a SCSI drive, I had no trouble at all with the ribbon cable inside the Mac.

As I understand it, a lack of termination wouldn't just be buggy, it wouldn't even turn on or allow any communication to happen on the bus? If so, it's terminated just fine. I'm very curious what kind of trickery the external enclosure was doing to make the drive unterminated in the enclosure, but terminated as soon as it's removed from it.

 

[joethezombie]

Later in life SCSI luxuries included software selectable SCSI ID.  I'm not familiar enough with that drive to know if it supports it, but I doubt any SE/30 era software could configure it.  Look for a jumper called TE, it may have been connected to the external case, allowing for the case to control termination depending on if the passthrough was used or not.

 

[Jinnai]

oh, it'll do something unterminated. I've had seemingly random errors when forgetting to terminate a drive. Also I was told not to init drives at all, just partition and install. But I've had a heck of a time with SCSI drives, so....

 

[SE30_Neal]

My avid wouldn’t do anything without the terminator plug on the back. Once setup and formatted I then re-assigned it number 4 in my scsi chain after my scanner, CD-ROM and zip drive. Set it as 0 when setting it up

 

[modulusshift]

Okay, that's good to know. I've managed to track down the jumper guide for this drive and I'll see how it's configured later today.

Edit: And thanks to SE30_Neal for getting this discussion started. I will try the copy of Silverlining I've got lying around or Lido, if the termination isn't the issue. I just would have preferred Apple's tools if they would have worked.

 

[jupo]

Yeah, usually external drives have termination with an external plug in the passthrough port. Internally, you have to set termination on the last (or only) internal drive on the ribbon cable. Older drives had resister packs, but as noted above, the 2GB drive probably has a TE jumper somewhere, I'll agree that while drives sometimes work with improper termination you can't trust them to work reliably.

Oh, and about the label, they started to get cheap and didn't make separate labels for the SCSI versions of the drives.

 

[modulusshift]

That label thing is a kind of funny piece of trivia. And you all were right, as soon as the TE jumper was set up, everything ran perfectly. Wow, this machine boots fast with a hard drive.