Sick Quantum Drive

[CelGen]

I'm trying to refurbish an SE/30 to make it useable again but I'm trying to pull some files off it and I've run into a problem.

The machine booted first, second and third try. I got to the desktop and while a little sluggish because I didn't have enough ram installed the disk worked. I ran one of the applications just to verify it was what I needed and the machine hung which I wasn't entirely surprised about because a few of them were very, very early assembly written applications which don't like running on the later macs. On reboot it starts to boot and starts thrashing the drive at the happy mac but nothing happens. I put the mac in slave mode (press the programmers switch to prevent the machine form booting) and plugged it into my powerbook using the SCSI port. Drive setup sees the disk but the machine hangs when you try to mount it after thrashing about for a bit. Disk First Aid can't do anything because the disk is not mounted. Norton Disk Doctor is just as unhelpful. Snooper can't do read/write tests also because it isn't mounted but seek, random sector and SCSI chain tests pass. I'm running out of ideas on how to save the data on this disk.

 

[tanaquil]

Maybe Diskwarrior? It has rescued data from disks I thought were long gone.

 

[CelGen]

Disk warrior will not see volumes which are not mounted. As we've already observed the disk is corrupted in such a way that mounting fails.

My Mainstreet and Lombard, which are the only two machines that can boot a CD and are currently readily available, cannot boot from the CD, no matter how goddamn hard I tell them "YOU SEE THAT THING SPINNING IN YOUR CD DRIVE? THAT THING WITH THE VALID SYSTEM FOLDER? BOOT IT YOU USELESS GIT!"

Any plan B?

 

[tanaquil]

I've been able to get Diskwarrior to see and work with volumes that were unable to mount, but I'm sure the level/nature of the problem is a factor. Best of luck!

 

[BadGoldEagle]

I've been able to get Diskwarrior to see and work with volumes that were unable to mount, but I'm sure the level/nature of the problem is a factor. Best of luck!

I wish I knew that before I attempted to repair a HD40SC... Now it's dead. RIP.

 

[CelGen]

I've been able to get Diskwarrior to see and work with volumes that were unable to mount, but I'm sure the level/nature of the problem is a factor. Best of luck!

Unless I'm doing it wrong. I'm running the application right off the CD once the OS is loaded off the powerbook. Should I be completely installing the utility?

 

[tanaquil]

Have you tried starting the PB up with the Diskwarrior CD and attempting to detect attached drives from there? (If you can, I don't remember which versions of Diskwarrior were able to start up which systems. I have DW 3, 4 and 5.) 

Certainly I have encountered disks I couldn't save - it really depends on the nature of the corruption/failure/problem.

Another utility I have sometimes had luck with is MacTools (Pro or even earlier), the one that originally came with Copy II Mac and later spun off to become its own thing. Again, mixed results.

 

[techknight]

if its clicking repeatedly over and over again in almost an exacting match pattern, its probably trying to re-calibrate on each sector read. 

Likely cause: Head crash. Sorry...

 

[CelGen]

Have you tried starting the PB up with the Diskwarrior CD and attempting to detect attached drives from there? (If you can, I don't remember which versions of Diskwarrior were able to start up which systems. I have DW 3, 4 and 5.) 

My Mainstreet and Lombard, which are the only two machines that can boot a CD and are currently readily available, cannot boot from the CD, no matter how goddamn hard I tell them "YOU SEE THAT THING SPINNING IN YOUR CD DRIVE? THAT THING WITH THE VALID SYSTEM FOLDER? BOOT IT YOU USELESS GIT!"

It seems its boot priority is the SCSI bus, then internal IDE bus and then the CD drive if it can't find anything. Yes, I also basically held the C key down until the cows came home. This was frustrating as it would try booting the damaged drive first, then hanging so I'd have to hotplug the drive in after MacOS had loaded off the powerbook.

if its clicking repeatedly over and over again in almost an exacting match pattern, its probably trying to re-calibrate on each sector read.

Nope. It's spinning up and completing its initial seek test. It has not crashed. It can read the embedded servo track but not the data tracks it seems to want to even mount. It's like the drive is really badly corrupted.

Anyways, now it's not even showing up as not mounted now. It just shows up as not initialized. Welp.

 

[techknight]

Next step is grab a PC with a SCSI card, and run ddrescue. clone the failing drive to an image, and work with the image either in r-studio, or even OSX Disk utility or something... I just did this very thing on a 160MB IBM drive from an LC475. Cloning just the partition to an image file using DDrescue, mounts in Basilisk or hfvexplorer as a hardfile.