Two definites and Two maybes

[LCGuy]

Went to the tip shop this morning and had a bit of a look. One thing that caught my eye were two big ol' HDDs. Had a closer look, they were SCSI drives! Big honkin' Compaq rebranded 4.3GB Seagate Barracudas. Price? $2 each for them. Thats the good news.

The bad news is that later on today I had a look at them, both of the controller boards have been damaged, cracks in chips and stuff. Meaning that there's a 100% chance that both drives are dead. I really should look closer at this stuff before I buy it...I just thought to myself, "Zomg! SCSI! 4.3GB!", and, well, yeah. Haven't had a chance to test them yet, but I don't have my hopes up.

The two maybes are a PowerBook 1400cs/166 and a NIB Compact Mac CRT. I'll start with the 1400 - yesterday Mum was out at some market where she went to a stall and found a guy selling a 1400, and got his name and phone number for me. He wants $40 for it, but I'm going to see if I can talk him down...apparently the machine works, but I think $40 is too much for a 12 year old laptop sight-unseen. Judging by what Mum says, its complete and has a CD-ROM, floppy, modem and power adaptor. I'll ring him later on this afternoon - we'll see what happens.

The Compact Mac CRT - I posted about this in Compact Mac a while ago, I went around to that junk shop again today and asked how much they wanted for it. The guy who runs the shop wasn't there, so he's going to ring me back tomorrow apparently. The lady who was there referred to it as "that thing", and had no idea what it was.

So yeah.

 

[LCGuy]

Online now, so I thought I'd update this - the 1400 is out - rang the seller a couple of hours ago, and its been sold. Bit of a bummer, it was supposed to have a CD-ROM drive too, something in particular that I'm after at the moment, since my 1400 hasn't had a working internal CD-ROM drive for the last 4 years, not to mention that when I was down in Sydney last month, I couldn't find even one in the whole of Sydney, the biggest city in the country. Oh well, these things happen to the best of us I guess.

Still haven't had time to test the Barracudas yet, but after what I saw, my hopes aren't that high.

 

[Bunsen]

If your CD is a 12x or faster, you can replace the internal mechanism with a standard laptop drive.

http://home.comcast.net/~macdan/ebms.html#1400_12x

 

[LCGuy]

Yeah, I saw that a few years ago, the problem is that mine's an 8x unit, which uses a 50 pin notebook HDD connection, as documented by macdan.

Oh by the way, the hard drives are out, more than out, actually. One of them just doesn't power up. The other one powered up...and then killed my Performa's SCSI bus. I can no longer use any SCSI device on that machine. With no SCSI devices attached, and the internal CD-ROM drive (SCSI) out, the machine boots and works fine. However, connect ANY SCSI device, or reinstall the internal CD-ROM drive, and either it gets the death chimes, or boots and then crashes before loading extensions. Great. :-/