Trouble with the old SE

B

ballsandy

Registered
Well it took me weeks to find an active mac forum but now i found one i will be posting a lot of things involving my collection of macs.

Let me start with a recent problem.

Last week i booted up my Macintosh SE which was in storage for a year and found out that the hard drive was acting up...AGAIN. The owner before me said that sometimes the interrupt motor got stuck so he opened the case and rotated the interrupt (NEVER DO THIS!!!). Since i had already removed any valueable data from the drive i proceeded to the HD SC setup which was included in my copy of sys. 7 i own. When i initilized the drive it failed during the verify process and became invisible. I have since not been able to use the drive or even access it. I personally suspect the drive was damaged when the interrupt was manually rotated. I do not have a spare drive and i am wondering if there is a way to recover thae drive...even if i have lost half of the drives useable surface or do i just have to go and find a new drive.
 
I don't see what that will do.
This the origional 20 mb SC Hard drive that came with the system when it was bought and this is the only hard drive i got for the SE.
Anyways, that didn't work.
 
Well, it sounds like that drive is pretty much dead. And as I would rarely recommend opening up any of the Macintosh, Macintosh Plus, Macintosh SE or Macintosh SE/30 lines, I think your best bet is to forget about the internal drive and get an external drive.

Of course, if you were going to upgrade to a Super Drive on that system* at the same time as replacing the hard drive, then it would be worth the effort of opening the system up (or getting someone who works on Macs to open it up... I've worked on a number of these systems myself and rarely charge full rate because of their limited usefulness these days).





* Note: I'm assuming that this is an early SE because of the 20 MB drive, my old SE had the Super Drive and came with a 40 MB drive. If it already has the Super Drive, then an external hard drive would be the best bet.
 
Just for clarification, the "SuperDrive" that RacerX is referring to is not the optical drive that we now see in all the new Macs. The SuperDrive of that time was a floppy drive that would not only read and write to the 800K floppies of older Mac systems, but was able to read and write to 1.44 MB floppies as well as read/write/format floppies in PC format with the help of Apple File Exchange (later changed to PC Exchange in newer System OS versions).
 
If you've got a torx screwdriver, there's no problem opening an SE.
All compacts since the Plus have a self-discharging CRT, but its always wise to be careful around it.

Find yourself a smallish (1gb +-) 50pin SCSI drive and stick that it. That'll format OK with the patched HD setup, and it'll be a little bit faster than the stock 20/40mb drive :)
 
Mabye i can use the 300 mb drive that is currently in my powermac 8600/300 when i get a bigger drive.
ok, thanks.
 
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