Tecmar MacDrive

[Crutch]

Recently picked up a Tecmar MacDrive from the Vintage Mac Museum auction (thanks again for auctioning off these rare and interesting items).  Curious if anyone has much experience with these — I read @Dog Cow’s interesting blog on the topic but couldn’t get quite as far as he did.  I can power up the drive - connected via Serial 1 to either my printer or modem port on my known-good 128k Mac (with a bad internal floppy drive - thus the 400k external!) - but when I boot from the Tecmar startup disk, I get stuck at the screen pictured as the drive’s LED continues to blink forever.  Is it possible the drive never quite gets warmed up (I’ve waited hours)?  So far I’ve been too lazy to open it up and poke around inside (also slightly intimidated because it weighs a ton and looks like you need to remove about 20 screws to open this beast...).  Oddly once I reach this screen, clicking the mouse or pressing any key results in a horrible clicking sound and crazy noise on the CRT; I have to reboot to stop it.

If I start from any other disk, the Mac works fine but if I then insert the Tecmar utilities disk and try to run the volume utility, I’m told the drive wasn’t found and I need to restart and try again.

Any ideas welcome.

 

[Dog Cow]

Mine did the same thing, with the LED dimly flashing. I left the thing on for maybe 2 or 3 hours and then it finally worked.

The Tecmar MacDrive was a junky product with junky technical support. Mine is now broken in different ways, and I'm not eager to bend over backward to get it running again. :-/