fyndr
Well-known member
I acquired an LC III without a hard drive a couple of months ago and have gone through the laborious process of finding a working compatible hard disk drive. I started with an 80 MB Quantum ProDrive ELS 50-pin SCSI drive which worked the first day, but then failed on all subsequent boot attempts. I then ordered a 1GB drive but was accidentally shipped a 68-pin SCSI drive from HP instead. Even after trying a 50 to 68 pin adapter and a patched version of Apple HD SC Setup 7.3.2 (from the System 7.5 Disk Tools floppy), the machine never did recognize the drive as being attached to the SCSI port.
Today I got back from a computer recycling place and tried out three 50-pin SCSI drives that I was able to get there on the cheap. The first was a 160 MB Apple brand drive, which seemed to be recognized fine but reported "Unable to write to the disk" when trying to initialize/test the drive. The second was an 80 MB IBM drive, which I've heard have a reputation for reliability, but that was not recognized at all by the disk setup program despite the patching or the fact that the drive is Apple-approved to begin with. Finally I was able to get a 40 MB Conner drive initialized and have put a provisional System folder on it (pretty much just what was on the Disk Tools floppy) so that I can verify it still boots over the coming days and doesn't seize up like the Quantum ProDrive did.
My question is, is there anything I can do to troubleshoot the remaining drives to see if they can be salvaged for use by the LC III? All of these drives are for internal use only, and so I have no way of leveraging the working drive to get, e.g., different drive formatting programs onto the machine to test them (unless there's a cable/adapter that would allow this via the serial port or something). Could there be an issue with the machine itself in failing to recognize the IBM or HP drives?
Otherwise, if all else fails and I just settle for the working 40 MB drive, are there recommendations for what version of classic Mac OS to install given the disk space constraint? My original idea was to put System 7.5.3 on there, but that would take up all of the drive space even with a minimal install.
Today I got back from a computer recycling place and tried out three 50-pin SCSI drives that I was able to get there on the cheap. The first was a 160 MB Apple brand drive, which seemed to be recognized fine but reported "Unable to write to the disk" when trying to initialize/test the drive. The second was an 80 MB IBM drive, which I've heard have a reputation for reliability, but that was not recognized at all by the disk setup program despite the patching or the fact that the drive is Apple-approved to begin with. Finally I was able to get a 40 MB Conner drive initialized and have put a provisional System folder on it (pretty much just what was on the Disk Tools floppy) so that I can verify it still boots over the coming days and doesn't seize up like the Quantum ProDrive did.
My question is, is there anything I can do to troubleshoot the remaining drives to see if they can be salvaged for use by the LC III? All of these drives are for internal use only, and so I have no way of leveraging the working drive to get, e.g., different drive formatting programs onto the machine to test them (unless there's a cable/adapter that would allow this via the serial port or something). Could there be an issue with the machine itself in failing to recognize the IBM or HP drives?
Otherwise, if all else fails and I just settle for the working 40 MB drive, are there recommendations for what version of classic Mac OS to install given the disk space constraint? My original idea was to put System 7.5.3 on there, but that would take up all of the drive space even with a minimal install.
