Only one hard drive works

[vik]

Hi;

I'm in the process of saving some old macs;

I've encountered a difficult issue: only a specific MiniScribe 20mb hard drive works on a se/30.

If I try another drive that boots fine on a IIcx (a 8gb maxtor ide drive with an acard adapter), or any other drive, it does not work.

SE/30 is recapped, I've checked the traces and tried replacing the scsi chip on the motherboard.

Also tried booting from another disk ID.

(also something weird on this mac: opening "Config PPP" program gives an error, either from a boot disk or any system version, can this be hardware related as the drive problem ?)

I run out of ideas

 

[Schmoburger]

Can you please describe in greater detail exactly what part of the process fails? To be able to diagnose and troubleshoot, we need to have abetter idea of what the nature of "doesnt work" is. Presumably it will not boot a system from the drive, however does the drive spin up at all and if it does, does it stay spinning or spin up then shut down?... if it spins up, are there any access noises, or other noises that are less promising? Assuming the drive does actually spin up to full RPM, does it mount a volume on the desktop when booted from a floppy or another drive, orr does it simply act as though the disk isnt there? If you havent booted from a known good drive yet to ascertain this, you need to do so... I would like to assume you have, however I find it best to assume very little when it comes to troubleshooting. Assuming it does not mount the volume to desktop, does a disk utility such as Drive Setup  or Norton detect the physical presence of the drive at all (the drive itself, not to be confused with the formatted partition/s on it which are mounted to desktop) or is it basically non-existent to the computer?

Answering these will give a far better picture of what we possibly are dealing with.

 

[vik]

Sorry for the lack of details:

In the mac IIcx:

The 8gb drive spin up, is visible as a disk, is partitionnable, is installable and bootable. (everything works).

In the SE/30:

At boot, the 8gb drive spin up, made clicking noises for 0.2 seconds (and then stops clicking), then it is never detected by the system (SCSI tools reports no device, Apple SC disk utility says no disk, etc).

I tried with another scsi disks in the se/30, they are never detected, but spin up.

The only drive detected and partitionnable, installable and bootable in the SE/30 is the 20mb MiniScribe disk.

 

[eR1c]

Apple disk tools are kind of useless in my opinion, can you try using Lido?

One of my drives could not be recognized and apple disk tools were no help. It wasn't until imised Lido that I was able to see the drive and format it.

 

[Unknown_K]

Termination issues probably. IS the 8GB HD SCA by chance?

 

[vik]

I will try with Lido.

No, not an SCA disk. why ?

 

[Unknown_K]

8/9gb native 50 pin SCSI drives are not that common.

 

[johnklos]

vik wrote that the drive is an 8 gig Maxtor IDE drive which is using an Acard SCSI-IDE adapter.

vik: Is the Acard adapter a 50 pin SCSI adapter, or a 68 pin with a 68 to 50 pin adapter?

 

[vik]

Tested more things:

Compaq 9.1Gb SCSI drive via a 68pin to 50pin adapter; this one is seen by Lido and Apple (patched) disc utility,

but can't be formatted. (OSErr = 5 Bad SCSI Command: phase error.)

While using this disk, scsi bus scanning with Lido was veeeery slow (~10sec per scsi device ID)

Lido with the acard adapter and the 8gb Maxtor disk gives no device found at all.

(the acard is a 7720U 50pin)