External Hard Drive for a Mac 512ke

[tanaquil]

Hello,

Apologies if this post is in the wrong place; I looked around several of the boards but didn't see any hard drive discussion in Peripherals. Links to other relevant discussions most welcome (I did search, but didn't find anything on this precise topic).

I am getting back into vintage mac collecting after a long hiatus (I collected a bunch of stuff about 15 years ago). Among the items gathering dust in my basement were a Mac 512Ke and a Mac Plus (both boot to floppy and are working), along with two external SCSI hard drives, one Cutting Edge, one MacBottom (both HD 20, I believe, though I can't get the CE one to start to find out). The MacBottom SCSI disk does work.

My question is about the CE hard drive, which used to work the last I remember years ago, but now won't mount. It powers up and spins (and makes a lot of noise, probably not good), and the computer behaves as if it is trying to communicate with it (eg the drive spins more at the moments when the computer is trying to talk to it), but no HD image shows up on the desktop when I mount from a floppy, and disk utilities that I have used to try to test or reformat the drive (Apple Disk Utilities, a very old copy of Norton Utilities, the original CE formatting disk) come up with various errors.

If I wanted to open up the enclosure and put a new SCSI hard drive in it to replace the one that may have failed, what brand of internal HD would I need to buy? Alternatively, are there any HD troubleshooting sites out there that I could work through to possibly reformat the malfunctioning drive and try to get it running again?

Any advice re: using external HDs with 68000 Macs generally welcome!

 

[Apache Thunder]

If it's making more noise then it should it could either be bearings or more likely probably the heads crashed.

You won't be able to "open it up" and replace the drive with a SCSI drive. The 128k/512k did not have SCSI ports. The hard-drives at the time connected to the external floppy port. They are nothing like the external SCSI enclosures used on the Macintosh Plus and newer machines. The only other hard-drives you'll be able to use with it is other drives that also used the floppy port. I could be wrong since I never worked with these older machines, but I'm pretty sure the hard-drives at this time were not interchangeable. You wouldn't be able to use the enclosure for anything other then the exact drive that was in it. The controller board may have also been part of the main logic board of the drive it self, so that would also make it impossible to replace the drive in the enclosure with anything other then that exact drive. Unless you can cram a different brand/model hard-drive in there that also used the floppy port.

But such drives always came in an external enclosure (unlike the SCSI drives which also had internal versions) so that wouldn't make much sense and you won't really find them sold outside of the enclosures they came in. With the 128k/512k, your best bet is to simply replace the entire unit with a new one.

You could also just get a FloppyEmu. Those let you use SD card  as storage and supports emulating hard-drives (or was it MicroSD card? I can't recall. I know the SCSI2SD adapter used MicroSD. I forget which one the FloppyEmu uses). It would save you the future trouble of replacing failing drives which will become quite common for such old hardware.

 

[rsolberg]

Apache, you're right that the 512Ke does not have SCSI built in, but there were a number of third-party upgrades that added SCSI. Dove is one make/manufacturer that comes to mind. If there's any uncertainty for the OP, they can check the number of pins on the computer's ports. The floppy connector has 19, SCSI has 25.

 

[techknight]

Well if its a MacBottom, chances are its not SCSI. Even though they did make a few. If the MacBottom was used with the 512k, you likely need a bootdisk to transfer control to the macbottom HDD. 

If you find that disk, it would be awesome to copy it! I have a MacBottom without the driver as well. 

 

[tanaquil]

Thank you, everyone, for weighing in. I'm sorry it has taken me this long to respond. I made an account to post here and then promptly, like a moron, forgot which forum site I had posted on. But I worked it out and now I'm back!

You all are right - the 512Ke does not have a SCSI port, only a floppy port. I had the Mac Plus and the 512Ke out at the same time and got them mixed up. The Mac Plus does have the SCSI port.

Both of the hard drives, Cutting Edge and MacBottom, are indeed SCSI drives - though the MacBottom is a weird one, it has one SCSI cable emerging directly from the box [with a DB25 connector on the end] and one additional DB25 port for chaining.

I sort of answered my own question by getting carried away by curiosity and opening up the case of the Cutting Edge (the non working drive). I cut my fingers and made a grand mess all round, including damaging the power connector in the process of detaching it from the hard drive, but hey, it was a learning experience. Turns out the CE (I can't speak for the MacBottom) has an absolutely terrible internal design such that, once you've taken out the screws to get the old drive out, you will *never get them back in again*. 

I consigned the carcass (case and drive) to my workbench in case I feel like attempting further exploration, but the state of the drive reminds me of that old joke explaining why the story about Santa visiting every house on Xmas eve defies the laws of physics. "Conclusion: If Santa ever existed, he's dead now." 

I do not believe I inherited any MacBottom floppies along with the drive, but if I ever locate one, I'll be sure to pass it along.

 

[olePigeon]

Sounds odd.  Must be a way to get those screws back in, otherwise they couldn't 've gotten them in in the first place.

 

[tanaquil]

I didn't want to get into the details in case I couldn't describe it without pictures (and I'm not sure how to upload pics yet), but basically:

The hard drive itself is all one piece, there is no frame structure that can be separated from it (the screws screw directly into holes on the controller board - is that the right term? - on the bottom of the drive).

At least one small cable has to be plugged into the bottom of the hard drive and extends out a few millimeters, so the drive cannot lay flat on the bottom of the box; it must be raised.

The screws pass through the bottom of the box, have several little plastic bits (washers/tubes) that stack onto each screw to create the "base" for the hard drive, and the drive then rests on them.

My problem was that I never succeeded in getting the screws and the plastic bits all back in at the same time. You have to turn the assembly upside down to put the screws through the bottom (or support it in midair somehow, I guess). Then you have to stack all the plastic bits on the screws without the screws falling out (and there is nothing to hold them in). Finally, you have to rest the drive flat on all the plastic bits (and hope you didn't drop any during the process because they have to be exact or the drive will not be flat), fit the drive on top of the screws such that the screws go into the holes on the bottom of the drive, and tighten all the screws - without any screws or plastic bits falling out, because if even one of the others falls out while you are tightening a screw, you have to start the whole process all over again.

Evidently there's a way to do it, since the engineers got the darn thing assembled in the first place. If I had persisted long enough, I might have worked it out even with my clumsy fingers, but eventually all my messing about resulted in one of the cables getting damaged, and the drive had not been working in the first place, so I gave it up as a bad job. I still have all the bits and bobs though!

More than you wanted to know, sorry...

 

[tanaquil]

I've realized through re-reading this thread and doing some other reading that I never understood how the original HD20 worked in the first place, that is fascinating. I've never seen or owned an HD20 that plugged into the floppy drive port.

However, re: the disk, I did come across a handmade HD20 Startup disk that I must have created long ago from a disk image I found god-knows-where; it has a 1986 version of the System + Finder plus the HD20 INIT. Is that what you meant by a disk for MacBottom, or are you thinking of one that has MacBottom-specific drivers?

This link also has more info on the HD20 Startup disk, if it helps anyone else:

http://www.vintagemacworld.com/hd20.html

 

[uniserver]

hey,  i think here ,, we maybe be a few steps ahead of you on the topic of HD20  

 

[tanaquil]

Very cool! I have to do a lot more reading to understand how the Floppy EMU and the SCSI2SD work. I'll probably want to try them out at some point.

 

[max1zzz]

On getting the screws back in, it just takes practice

Or what you can do is put a piece of tape over the head of each screw to hold it in place, stack the washers on each screw, put the drive on top then take the tape off each screw one by one screwing each in by a couple of turns, once you have done this for each screw simply screw each one in all the way

I have done this way to many times with xbox 360's back when I used to repair them....

 

[tanaquil]

Thanks! I suspected that something like that might help, and I even tried tape, but I think by that time I was tired and frustrated and getting clumsier by the moment, so stuff kept falling off even with the tape.

I will keep the hardware around (because I love having broken stuff to tinker with), and maybe I can practice putting the screws on until I get good at it. Then again, I might never need to do such a thing again.

 

[CC_333]

Yeah, all I can say is practice, practice, practice!

And if you do decide to repair it at some point (perhaps with a new drive mechani), that cable you broke can probably be repaired easily enough (unless it't one of those thin ribbon cables).

Have fun! It's an interesting (and sometimes frustrating) hobby, for sure!

c