Hello,

I know I'm opening one of those annoyingly clueless threads on how to save my own butt, but I'll try to minimize that.

Background: A retired friend who had a long career in literary translations (Indonesian to English) was recently asked for his original, pre-publication translations of speeches of a well known Indonesian religious figure for a retrospective review of his work. I managed to extract about 50% of the translations from several hard drives covering his work in the early 60s, but we are seeking the earliest, late 50s work. This work is most likely archived on a MAC Classic that is at my workbench now.

The MAC will not boot of course, but only clicks and flashes it's display about once a second. An opinion from an Apple dealer recommended a DR service, advice well taken and well understood. However, I'm always up for a lost cause, and my friend quite understands that I could make no promises.

1) The disk is a Quantuum 40M SCSI drive.
2) When I plugged it into an Adaptec 2904 PCI/SCSI in a Win7 Desktop, I could see the drive, but it would not
show data ("Drive must be initialized...", didn't take that bait!).
3) I eventually realized that the drive wasn't spinning up, and being unfamiliar and unsure of the drive logic,
I returned the drive to the Mac.
4) It also would not spin up in the Mac.
5) However, when I powered the Mac up without the drive, the display stopped flashing and instead
came up in a checkerboard pattern.

Based on #5, it appears that the drive is consuming enough current to overdraw the Mac power supply, tripping an overcurrent circuit and preventing it from powering up the display. Is it possible that this is because the spindle motor on the drive is frozen? I'm guessing that it is the motor that consumes the most current on a drive. If so, are there any external remedies?

(I did go through the board and re-seat every socketed component; the MAC has not been used for at least 15 years.)

Many thanks,
Andy

The normal display for a functional Mac is to have a flashing question mark with no boot device plugged in. You have other issues . . . bad electrolytic caps and other failed parts are typical of a Mac Classic analog board. A checkerboard pattern sounds like dirty RAM fingers . . . or who knows.

Chances are the drive has a case of "stiction", where the heads are stuck onto the platter surfaces; the original lubricant has become like glue instead.

The drive has to be opened to resolve the problem; preferably in a clean room, and preferably by someone who knows what they are doing.

_________________
http://www.datasaversllc.com

I don't think this is a stiction case as the drive was seen in windows?

When the drive was connected to power and the Adaptec 2904 interface was it spinning?

So if it does spin then see if you can create an image file of the Quantum drive and save it to the windows pc hard drive. You could use R-studio or Dmde to create the image. Then run software recovery tools on the image and see what you can find. R-studio would be a good start. I have to be honest with you as I don't know about the compatibility with an early Mac os and modern day recovery tools but somebody should be able to advise.

Oh and most important is if the drive doesn't spin then refer to the advice given in the previous post.

Was this one of those old Seagate around 2 gig hard drives... had a big motor.... stepper days!!! they used to get stuck even when new back then when not used for a while. I seem to recall that the motor shaft back then could be spun externally. Its been a LONG time so I am a bit fuzzy. The prior post about spinning is key- follow his recommendation.

Depending upon the adapter, a SCSI drive can "show up" in the POST and be completely dysfunctional -- including not spinning.

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http://www.datasaversllc.com

Perfect answers, ladies (?) and gentlemen, thank you.

To answer the ambiguities identified in my original post,
1) The disk did not spin in the PC; it appears that we could see the electronics (I/O and cache on the PCB) but not the data on the platters.
2) There's no need to reincarnate the Mac, so I won't need to delve into the analog power board that drives the gazillion volts into the CRT. Been there before, not interested in doing that again, thanks.
3) This is a Quantuum 40 MB (that's Mega Byte; that's OLD!)
4) The conclusion that this is "stiction" sounds good. I'm going to investigate the maximum operational and storage temperatures for the drive and see if a little spa treatment might loosen the stiction. Yes, there's an equal possibility that heat would drive any remaining volatiles out of the lubricant and cure it nicely into cement.

One last question: should the drive spin up when the power plug is connected, even if the 50 pin data cable is not? That is the case for an IDE drive I've played with, and I'm guessing it is not different on SCSI.

-Andy

I thought stepper motors went out after 20MB and long before 2GB. :?

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

How does the drive appear when you "see" it? Do you see its model number? Can any HDD tool see it?

Did you put your ear against the drive, and did you hear any sound, however soft, that would suggest that the drive is attempting to spin?

AFAIK, SCSI drives need to be commanded to spin up. If so, could it be possible that the drive isn't getting the spin-up command, especially in the Mac environment?

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Some SCSI drives have jumpers to enable or disable the motor spin-up command.

IIRC, these drives didn't require a command from the Mac to spin up.

_________________
http://www.datasaversllc.com

My bad... should have typed MB, not GB. We called this the Seagate problem back then. Seagate came up with a new lubricant that stopped that issue. Do you remember the exposed motor shaft?