Thanks, mysterious 68kmla'er whose forum name I don't know!

[Anonymous Freak]

Well, in the Craigslist finds thread, there was an ad local to me with a *LOT* of great gear - Power Mac G3 with original dark blue Studio Display, color NextStation Turbo, Mystic Color Classic, etc.  I replied within a couple hours of the ad going live, but someone else had beaten me to it, and gotten most of the "good stuff."

But, left over were a "Macintosh 512K" and an Apple IIe with a bunch of expansion cards.  (And a not-working HD20.)

So I went by and picked them up.  Turns out the seller is a 68kmla member who basically forgot the forum existed.  (Hi, unknown-user-name!). 

Took home my ill-gotten goods. (Okay, perfectly legitimately-gotten,) played with them, and got everything all nice and cozy.



It's the one on the far right - on top of my working HD20. (I decided to line up all my "pre-Snow White" compact Macs.) And I noticed something odd - it booted from the HD20 without the "bootstrap" disk.  Likewise, its internal drive can read 800k floppies just fine.  Hey! This is a 512Ke, not a 512K!  (I emailed him with my discovery, and he replied "you know, I knew that, I just forgot when posting the ad.") 

I had my one working HD20, plus a dead HD20.  I decided to see if I could cobble together one working HD20 between my broken one and the broken one I just got.  Nope.  The drive in the new one spins (better than in my previous broken one,) and the OS knows it's plugged in and offers to format it - but I just can't get it to format.  Oh well.

It's nice having a "complete set" of compact Macs now.  And now if I can find an original release-model 128K logic board, I won't feel bad about swapping it in my 128 (which got a 512K upgrade at some point.)

 

[ScutBoy]

What IIe expansion cards did you get?

 

[Anonymous Freak]

A couple disk controllers (two of each of the 'old model' and 'new model', the exact names escape me,) one memory expansion, and what I believe is a serial card.

 

[BadGoldEagle]

Maybe a low level format will help this little HD20? This wipe can be done with Norton Utilities (6.0.4 or later) or maybe FWB Harddisk Tools.

 

[techknight]

All those apps including newer ones are going to look for the drive on the SCSI bus. Aint happenin. 

You need the original HD20 setup utility disk and use that to format it. 

 

[BadGoldEagle]

Yeah but you can't low level format a HD20 using those tools, right? Maybe a simple format will bring it back up, but...

 

[Paralel]

HD20 can't be low-level formatted by an end-user, full stop, according to Apple's own HD20 documents. If you need a Low-Level format to an HD20, you need to contact an Apple Tech... 30 years ago. I know someone here actually got an HD20 to low level format, but I don't how they did it.

 

[BadGoldEagle]

Dang it. Someone should build something like the UsbWidEx (Lisa Profile Debugger which actually lets you low level format a Profile/Widget as if you were using the proper Apple /// tools)

 

[slomacuser]

Must read --> http://www.vintagemacworld.com/hd20.html

The advanced options of "HD 20 Test" can be accessed by pressing Command-D when the dialog box is displayed. Don't fiddle with this test unless you are prepared to lose the data on the HD20. The Dstrct option allows you to reformat the HD20 and may help resurrect an otherwise dead drive.

I had problems initialising HD20 on an SE but it worked great on Plus.

"Symantec Utilities for Macintosh (SUM)" is the predecessor to the Norton Utilities.Suite of applications for partitioning and disk repair. It supports non-SCSI drives (HD20, MacBottom, HyperDrive are explicitly listed) and also supports MFS floppy disks in a limited way. It requires a Mac 512Ke, Plus, SE, Mac II (ie not 512K or 128K) and System v4.1 and Finder v5.3 or higher.