SyQuest 105 Cartridge

[jwse30]

So with all this quarantine stuff going on, and me being trapped in my house, I've started tinkering with my old Macs again. They were old and needed tinkering when I bought them 15 to 20 years ago. One of the items I have is a SyQuest drive that has no sticker on the front that is in an APS case.  Inside, the dirve has an APS sticker over what I would guess is a SyQuest sticker that would say what kind of drive it is. A few years ago I stumbled across a 105M disk that fits inside of it, but I don't know if that is the largest size disk this drive will accept.

When I put the disk in, it gives me an "unrecognizable disk, do I want to initialize?". It then gives me the option of Mac or PC formats. Were there other formats, or is this disk either brand new or damaged?

When I put the disk in, a few different SCSI utilities say that it is a 105 Meg drive, but none of them can mount it. I would like to see if there is anything on it before I erase it, just in case someone stored a cure for cancer on it

On another note, if anyone happens to have a 230 meg or 270 meg disk laying around, I would like to see what kind of drive this is. I am thinking since it seems to like the 105m disk, that it is a 270 meg drive. If I can get the disk mounted I could either email you the contents of the disk, or burn a CD of them, and then send the disk back if you wanted it.

I like these old drives. I have the 5 1/4 200 Meg one and an EZ135. The 135 has a bit of a problem with the plastic case swelling a bit, making the disk a bit hard to insert or remove, but still works fine. The 200 Meg drive works flawlessly, and I have a spare one, as well as a 44 Meg one too.

J White

 

[Fizzbinn]

What operating system are you running on the Mac you are testing the drive with?  If it's not bad it might be a PC FAT format that isn't supported by the PC Exchange Control Panel you have installed. I think the early versions of PC Exchanged only worked with floppies too. Does the format dialog that comes up show a data size for the format it offers?

Most SCSI utilities can show you drive info like model number. I have both 105 and 270 drives, their models are:

105MB: SQ3105S

270MB: SQ3270S

I think resellers/SyQuest bundled other vendors drivers originally but SyQuest did release their own branded drivers that work all the back to System 7 on all their SCSI drives:

https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/syquest-utilities-401

 

[waynestewart]

The Syquest drives probably worked with any computer that had SCSI so the disk could be in a number of formats. I used Syquest drives quite a bit with the Apple II so a lot of my disks are in ProDOS format.

I liked Syquest and collected quite a few. Never had a disk fail on me. Wish I could say the same for Iomega.

 

[jwse30]

I am trying it out on a powerbook 190 running system 7.5.2.  The disk utility I have been using on this machine is Silverlining Lite 2.0. When I select mount, it gives me this screen. I have the mouse clicked to show the drop down menu of possible formats. 



I guess if it is some obscure format or not formatted at all, there likely isn’t any data on it that could be useful. 

Silverlining shows this as cart 5: syquest sq3105s, which I assumed was the cartridge model number, not the drive. 

Thanks for the info. 

J White

 

[jwse30]

I liked Syquest and collected quite a few. Never had a disk fail on me. Wish I could say the same for Iomega.

I like the drives too. I've got three; a 200 Meg 5 1/4" drive, an EZ135, and this 105 Meg one. In my garage, I've also got a 44 M and another 200 M drive. I started using these a long time ago when I found the 200 Meg drive at Goodwill for something like $6 (it was a half off day) and it was in its original box. My wife used the 44 Meg cartridges when she was in college, so I bought it as more of a joke than anything. Now I have a lot of my 68k software backed up on various cartridges and for a while I was using the EZ 135 as the boot drive for an SE.

As for failures, I think I have one EZ 135 disk that may be dead. When I bought the drive it had 7 disks with it. The whole thing sat for at least ten years. In the past month I tried to get it working, and only 6 of them mount. I found backups of 6 of them on my G4 tower's hard drive, so it was likely dead before I received it. I haven't tried to format it yet. Maybe I'll try that today.

J White

 

[dzog]

The EZ135 is what I used back in the day. I remember it seeming like the smarter choice. And wow was it incredible to have 135MB cartridges considering I'd been living with a 160MB HDD and floppies. 

No trace of them in my possession nowadays... eventually Zip disks became ubiquitous and pre-installed on machines and I transitioned over. Must have gotten rid of my SyQuest stuff around then sadly. I do think I ended up with a defective disk or two. But I used them heavily.