PowerBook 170 Hard Drive Problem

[Mac128]

What are the likely causes for a 40MB Conner HD which spins up, sounds normal, but does not appear on the desktop and cannot be mounted by HD SC Setup off a System 7 Disk Tools floppy?

 

[JRL]

Try SCSIProbe!

Download

 

[tomlee59]

I have a small stack of dead 40MB Conners with that same behavior. I wish you better luck with yours than I had with mine!

 

[Mac128]

I have a small stack of dead 40MB Conners with that same behavior. I wish you better luck with yours than I had with mine!

Oh Tom, that is NOT the answer I was looking for ...

I moved the Conner to my PowerBook 100 and used it in SCSI Disk Mode with System Tools 7.0.1. HD SC Setup reports "Unable to read required information from the disk". This is certainly better than what it reported on the 170, at least it sees a disk. Now, what is causing it to hang? Could it need some kind of low-level format?

Disk first aid doesn't see it at all.

 

[JRL]

Like I said, try specialized SCSI software with a mount button like SCSIProbe.

 

[LCGuy]

I've got a 40MB Conner that (yes!) also has the same issue. HD SC Setup won't touch it, nor will Drive Setup, nor will HDT, nor will Lido, sadly.

 

[tomlee59]

Oh Tom, that is NOT the answer I was looking for ...

I moved the Conner to my PowerBook 100 and used it in SCSI Disk Mode with System Tools 7.0.1. HD SC Setup reports "Unable to read required information from the disk". This is certainly better than what it reported on the 170, at least it sees a disk. Now, what is causing it to hang? Could it need some kind of low-level format?

Disk first aid doesn't see it at all.

I wish I could offer you some encouragement. The most I could ever get these to do was to communicate that their capacity was now zero MB. The Setup message that you're seeing is what I recall seeing. IIRC, FWB Toolkit is what I used to discover that the drive was reporting a zero capacity. And a zero capacity apparently prevents tools from doing the right thing, because they (all?) assume that the reported capacity is accurate, and proceed from there. So, formatting won't happen (or the drive seems to start to format, but never terminates).

I hope that you are able to make more progress, because it sure would be nice to resurrect this stack. I have a few old 'books that could use 'em.