SE/30 Hard drive problem

[paulos]

Okay guys, my first post here and I hope you can help.

My SE/30 was recently suffering from Simasimac, but a thorough washing has cleared that problem. However, there is another problem.

Upon booting, the HDD light flashes, but the machine sits for some time doing nothing before ultimately presenting me with the infamous :?:

It boots okay from floppy, but refuses to recognise the internal hard drive. Using Norton Utilities I've tried scanning the SCSI bus but no devices can be found. I've also tried replacing the PRAM battery, the RAM and even the ROM SIMM but without any effect.

This problem was present before my Mac went Simasi, and I tried three different HDDs with the same result (the original 40MB, a 160MB from an LC475, and a 9GB from eBay).

I have a set of replacement capacitors ready (courtesy of trag's very speedy and highly recommended service!) but my question is this - do you think it's worth it? Or is she beyond repair? Anyone else encountered this problem?

 

[equill]

One. Welcome to the Forums.

Two. Washing the MLB may have given temporary relief, but the underlying cause has remained. Install the replacement caps soon, being prepared to find more electrolyte goo on the MLB after removal of the faulty caps.

Three. If you have an external SCSI cable for attachment of a peripheral SCSI device (a 'system cable' in Apple's parlance), plug it into the rear SCSI port (DB-25F) of the SE/30, and attach a peripheral device (CN-50F)—such as a CD-ROM drive—to the other end of the cable. Insert a terminator (CN-50M) into the second external port (CN-50F) of the peripheral device. If you have a passthrough external CN-50M/CN-50F terminator, that will do instead of an attached peripheral device.

What you do thereby is terminate the external SCSI daisy-chain of the SE/30. There is but a single SCSI bus in the SE/30, shared between external and internal devices. If you can now boot from the internal HDD you will know that you have a termination problem in the SCSI bus, and that most likely in the HDD. Since you will be opening the SE/30 for the recap. job you can check your configuration of the drive while you are there. What the configuration needs to be depends on the brand of drive and its age, so if the preceding is all gobbledy-gook to you, post the brand, capacity and type(-number) of your HDD. What you have already done with the drive, before or since installation, will be useful information. Because it can flash an activity LED, it may be an original Quantum LPS or ELP drive.

de

 

[paulos]

One. Thankyou!

Two. I know... I know... I just want to make sure she's salvageable before spending an age carefully replacing all the capacitors.

Three. Okay, I've tested with an external CD drive + terminator and it is *not* a termination issue. In Norton Utilities when you try and scan a drive, there are the options of the drives found (floppy + CD), plus options "Scan SCSI bus" and "More..."

"Scan SCSI Bus" goes away for a few seconds and thinks, then comes back with no change.

"More..." opens a window with a graphical view of the bus. I can see the Mac at #7, and the CD drive at #3. There is also a device at #0 which shows up whether or not the CD drive is attached. Clicking on this device activates the HDD light. Norton Utilities can scan this device to find any partitions, but the scan just takes forever without even getting above 0%. The HDD light remains lit throughout. Just before the scan though, Norton Utilities *does* identify it as a 40MB disk which is correct.

SO...

It seems that it's not a SCSI termination issue, and if need be I can probably use an external drive.

I've not been back in yet to identify the drive, but it's definitely an original. I think I recall it being a Quantum, but will tell you for sure after I've next gone in.

 

[equill]

While I still use Norton's SpeedDisk to optimize older HDDs (HFS formatted, and never with HFS+ format), I have no other recent experience of its disk utilities, because I use Silverlining exclusively on 100+ drives, both SCSI and ATA.

That said, your experience suggests recognition, but no handshake, between Norton and the drive. If you do not value whatever came as files on the drive, your difficulty may be no more if you simply reformat the drive. 'Reformat' in the sense of re-establishing Apple's several (invisible to the user) logical partitions in addition to the 'volume' that appears on the desktop, one of which includes the SCSI driver for that invaluable 'handshake'.

Apple's utility HD SC Setup is (designedly) rather diffident about overwriting non-Apple drivers, so you may need a utility with a hairier chest to reformat your drive. The usual disk utilities, some commercial and some free, use Apple's partition scheme of necessity, but vary in their take-over capacities.

de