Reading Old Hard Drive

[Jaywalker]

First post - nice forum!

I could use some help getting data off of my old Mac II ci System 7.1 that I stored some 12 - 13 years ago, I think.

The reason I stored it was the Super Drive (floppy) was erratic - worked sometimes and not others. I had the drive replaced, but the problem persisted - someone told me it was probably the floppy drive controller, but I never dug that far into it at the time.

I suspect the box has Applenet, but I never used it or any other networking scheme with it, except dial-up modem.

I started reading here about problems associated with accessing SCSI drives, which I assume mine is - it was the big 100 MB!

How do I access the data from it? Or, give me a starting link for researching it, please.

After I do that, how do I read it or convert it into something I can use in Mac OS X? I had Great Works word processing, spreadsheets, and drawing programs, and some AppleWorks data, along with FileMaker Pro 2.0 (or 2.5, but not 3.0).

I've always figured I'd get around to it some day...

Thanks.

 

[symphonix]

I usually start by working out what I have to work with, thanks to apple-history.com:

http://apple-history.com/body.php?page=gallery&model=IIci&performa=off&sort=family&order=DESC

This apge confirms that the hard drive is SCSI. If you have access to a PC or a Mac with a SCSI card, you might be able to plug it in and retrieve the data.

 

[Jaywalker]

My MacBook Dual Core doesn't have SCSI capability, I think.

 

[MClever]

Of the 3 Mac IIci's I've seen in the last year or so, they all had leaking caps on the logic board. There are wet spots around the surface mount caps (look like small tin cans the size of a pencil eraser). This caused erratic behavior & made data recovery difficult.

SCSI is a strange beast and results always vary. Our shop uses a PMG4 w/Adaptec SCSI card for older drive recovery. However, I've had trouble getting data off these Mac II drives using it. The drive would mount (after using SCSI Probe to force mount), but would give copy errors. I ended up installing the drive into the oldest Mac on our recycle skid (Mac PM7100) and this worked. Note: The G3 Beige Mac was the last Mac w/built-in SCSI, BTW it didn't work either

Appleworks should convert a fair amount of the old data.
Converting drawing files are the hardest.
FileMaker Pro files can be converted with FileMaker Pro Ver 5 or 6.

Good luck!

 

[Jaywalker]

Thanks. It sounds as if I may need a specialist for this. I'd thought about a FireWire Enclosure with SCSI, but it sounded a little harder than I wanted to work...