Mac Plus & hyperdrive 20

[luckybob]

I've been poking this mac plus I recently got.  It booted, but the drive did not spin up.

If you care to see:  

I popped it open the other day, and had a look around.  I resoldered the analog board connectors, so no more slapping the unit.  

I did find the probable cause for the failure; the power supply is not providing enough voltage.  I was getting ~7v on the +12v, ~3v on the +5, and the like 3v on the -12v.  Yea, not good.

There is no obvious failure of the power supply, but I don't think I will attempt to repair it.  For some reason they are powering the fan from the -12v.  I don't think I will do this either.  My thought is to use this guy:  http://www.ebay.com/itm/112196278067 It's probably a knockoff, but I don't think it really matters that much.

I'm probably going to temporarily power it with an AT power supply, but before I did that, I just wanted to make sure it wouldn't hurt anything.  I'm like 99.999% sure it will be fine, but I literally lose nothing by asking.  I did notice the pcb was version 2.0 if it matters.  I did dump the roms.  And ran them into a 68k decompiler for giggles.  

2nd step would be to see if it actually works.  This is really where I could use a few pointers.  if it does work, yay!  But if not, Can I just use any mfm drive that fits?  I haven't found any software for this upgrade.  So no format utility, or restoration of any kind.  

 

[mactjaap]

Absolutly a great find!

I really like your YouTube movies. A nice way to enjoy somebody elses finds!

 

[BadGoldEagle]

Hey bob

IIRC, the Hyperdrive partition can't be mounted on the desktop if you boot from a "normal" disk. You should try one of these disks (V3R1 & V3R2 for a Plus). But the fact it's not directly booting from it makes me think the HD might be bad. The Plus had SCSI but the HD in there is MFM (similar to IBM PCs of the time...)

I have a 512K Hyperdrive that doesn't work right now. I blame the HD. I'm seriously thinking about buying one of these. Sure it's expensive, but at least it's compatible with the disk controller on the Hyperdrive board...

 

[luckybob]

oh, thats a spicy meatball!

i will be trying a new power supply this evening. if it works, im going to try to image the drive on my ibm AT system. I should be able to do a raw read of the entire drive. From what i see on the hyperdrive, it uses a standard western digital controller chip, hopefully it is compatible enough todo that.

 

[luckybob]

Ok, progress has been made.

But it appears the board is sick.  With proper voltages it causes a sad mac.  only one line; 0F002.  If I googled it correctly, that is some sort of address exception in software.  Immediately my brain goes to the roms, but i'm certain they are properly socketed.  Maybe they are corrupted?

 

[EkriirkE]

luckybob & I ran across each other when I posted my similar machine elsewhere, so for sake of posterity I'll relay my revival of this device:  (gallery here https://imgur.com/gallery/N6MXv )

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When first powered on upon receiving the machine I experienced exactly what lucky bob was.  No HDD Spinup and a Dead Mac (error code forgotten)

After repairing the drive for various issues (most of the above gallery covers this) I was still experiencing the same problem...

The HyperDrive card honours the boot sequence of FDD > SCSI > HyperDrive, so I used one of my boot disks and after poking around some HDD utilities I found the drive was visible but not automatically mounting.  I could manually mount it but then the system became unstable (freezing randomly), and my attempts at imaging the drive always stopped at sector 999 before locking up the system.  Yes, 999, not a base-2 whole number like 1024.  Any attempts to read anywhere past 999 would freeze.  Interesting note; the device does not identify as SCSI or FDD (ala an HD20) so it uses its own ROM hooks/driver

Side note: If the drive has no System, the mac will still Happy Mac anyway, but then immediately Sad Mac which explains the persisting post-repair issue because there ended up being nothing on it.

After locating the drivers, booting from the driver install disk I could see the drive and mount it through the HyperDrive utility.  And as I mentioned, my attempts at imaging ended up being for naught because the "Drawer" (faux partition) was empty.  I initialised the HD with the utility, copied the System over and rebooted.  It worked!  Almost. 

Turns out the HD has a buttload of bad sectors (I very much doubt from my repairs, I know some will disagree): It booted through "Welcome to Macintosh" and just before Finder would load I got a system fault dialogue, forcing a reboot.  So I ran Norton Utilities 2.0's Speed Disk which performs a surface scan and marks, nay, occupies bad sectors via files in a hidden folder - meaning a format will bring back the bad sectors, and copying/backing them up will not work as the Catalog Tree will lose the occupying sector infos...

I re-copied the system and it boots perfectly now.

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I can tell this was designed before HFS was a thing (when the 128 and 512 were using MFS which did not have [proper] folders and everything resided in the root) because the HyperDrive uses a system of organisation they called "Drawers" to make up for that. These were almost partitions but they all drew from the total free space of the drive, so they acted more so like folders residing on the desktop. One bonus of their system was you could password protect any drawer. It will happily work with HFS, thankfully.

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There were 2 versions of the HyperDrive card that I'm aware of.  One for the 128, and one for the 512/Plus.  Being installed on a Plus seems too hackey to me since SCSI is available.  If I had more than one 512K, I'd transplant it there.

 

[luckybob]

got a new power supply.  A nice compact meanwell unit.  The hard drive was stuck, but just a gentile manual turning of the spindle from outside the drive unstuck it.  Still getting the chime then sad mac 0f002 error instantly.  So if anyone reading this happens to have a copy of the firmware I could cross check against mine, that would be sweet.