My first real conquest: Boxed SE

[genie_mac]

I have been picking up bits and pieces, mainly off Ebay, over the last while and the odd machine locally but usually just units without any extras.

So last week I finally managed to come across a nice conquest in the form of a boxed Mac SE (800k drive) with a good bit of stuff, and all at a very reasonable price.



The box is in reasonable condition but someone put some tape around the edges. The foam inserts are partly present but in poor condition.

The MiniScribe spins up and is detected but doesn't read or write. I've tried Lido, Norton etc but no luck yet.

The SyQuest on the other hand is rock solid and all cartridges work without a problem. Managed to boot off that too. I'll definitely hang on to that.

The Fujitsu 1Gb drive is a funny one. It didn't spin up at all, someone had removed the "start" jumper. Spins up fine now and is formatted NTFS but I just can't get it to work with the Mac yet. Will keep trying.

The ComputerTalk for AppleTalk I haven't a clue about. Didn't find any info on that. Some kind of PhoneNet maybe?



The SE has been upgraded to 4Mb and works grand

 

[uniserver]

wow man.. that is nice!

Very nice!

Ya might have to take it apart, go though it … well you know your Buds, from Cork assembled it, LIke.

 

[ScutBoy]

Nice!

About 10 years ago while garage sale-ing in our little Minnesota town, I found a boxed SE with all the inserts, paperwork, disks, and the original invoice from a dealer in the Twin Cities. I don't remember exactly right now, but it was about 3 grand, plus around $100 for the keyboard.

The lady at the sale was surprised that I was willing to pay a whole 5 dollars for an antique computer that a pastor used to write sermons on Saturday afternoons!

Sadly, they had already pitched the Imagewriter that went with it, because they didn't keep the box...

Have fun with the SE!

 

[techknight]

the miniscribe probably has to be reformatted again, using true low-level formatting. I dont know if the FORMAT UNIT scsi command will work or not.

 

[unity]

Sweet. Complete boxed units are getting harder to find. And if they are being sold, for FAR too much I feel. Nice grab!

 

[genie_mac]

the miniscribe probably has to be reformatted again, using true low-level formatting. I dont know if the FORMAT UNIT scsi command will work or not.

Thanks for the tip. Any idea how to go about that? Is there a tool for that? Sure enough all format utils I tried didn't work. Using Norton undelete discovered some files alright but couldn't access them.

 

[uniserver]

pretty sure i used 7.5.3-PatchedHDSC.img.sit to format my mini scribe.

 

[techknight]

Since its a stepper based drive, its possible just issuing the CDB for FORMAT UNIT should do it. But you need a low-level SCSI utility.

 

[genie_mac]

No luck with the MiniScribe. Stepper motor is clicking like mad on startup (probably moving heads to track zero?). I assume that's not normal, but don't know for a stepper motor drive. Drive is also throwing SCSI phase errors when trying to access it. Have been playing around with some disk utilities and managed to read the contents of the drive once but haven't been able to access any files. Very flaky...

Funny thing is, I tried to low level format it on my Windows machine but program fails saying drive is too small

 

[techknight]

The stepper will do that if it encounters a seek error. Its also possible the head amplifier is bad, going bad, or the head itself is bad. (rare)

I used to have an MFM miniscribe that did the same exact thing.stepper ran back and forth over and over again. I took the PCB off, and swapped it with my SCSI miniscribe. Same mechanics, different PCB.

Problem carried over with the MFM drive board, which told me the head amplifier is actually on the board itself.