Re: hard drive trbls

[dempson@actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

RICHARD PIRONG <rpirong@aztec.asu.edu> wrote:

> I have a 500 meg Apple hard drive. (Quantum LPS365) which I salvaged
> from an old Mac.

If it is 500 MB, it wouldn't be an "LPS365".  My first Quantum drive was
an LPS model, about 240 MB in size, and the model number is supposed to
be the drive capacity (I don't have mine handy to check its number).

I can't see any LPS365 model on Quantum's web site.  There is an LPS540,
which sounds like it matches your drive for capacity and jumper
settings.

> I did have it formatted and partitioned once but managed to mess it up
> somehow. Now all I want to do is re-format and start over.

Any idea how you messed it up?

I managed to partially destroy my Rodime 60 MB drive by interrupting a
formatting operation (by resetting the computer).  It subsequently
refused to reformat, and I couldn't even repartition it, but it would
work with its existing format and partitions.

According to at one source, this drive has a "maintenance track" which
contained critical system information required during a format
operation, and it was probably damaged.  This sort of problem can only
be fixed by the manufacturer (or possibly someone with the right
software, which is may require installing a special ROM in the drive
instead of its normal firmware).

> When I screwed it up, I must have overlaid the starting track with
> garbage because now no program will recognize it as a scsi drive.
>  
> I have tried using my old Apple rev (C) card and my RamFast rev (C)
> eprom ver 2.0 .
>  
> The Apple software, Chinook and RamFast won't do it. The RF tries but
> declares a MLI error $35/$2f. I don't have a list of RF errors.

ProDOS error $2F is "Device offline".  Error $35 is a nonstandard one.
This might be a RamFast internal error, an interpretation of a SCSI
error code, etc.

Does Chinook SCSI Utilities not even see the drive?

> The drive itself confuses me a little. The 6 jumper blocks look normal
> but are not all labled. The A0, A1 and A2 for scsi ID are clear but
> two are unlabled and one is labled PO. PO appears to have something to
> do with startup delay and causes a motor shutdown after a few seconds.

According to the Quantum web page on the LPS270 and LPS540:

<http://www.quantum.com/support/archive/lps270_scsi_support.htm>

the "PO" jumper determines whether or not parity is enabled over the
SCSI bus.  This should always be ON, as far as I'm aware, because the
Apple II controllers use parity, and would get errors communicating with
the drive if the drive wasn't supplying parity.