I'm looking to replace some faulty Miniscribes in a couple of Emaxes I own (2 HD SE & 1 HD). I've read HD replacement posts in various forums over the years, and I think I have a decent handle on the basics and what drives should work. I'm also pretty technical so in general I know what I'm doing. ;p
I previously tried a 105 meg Quantum ProDrive LPS that I pulled from my own Mac IIcx before I sold it. Once in the Emax, it formatted properly and I was in the process of restoring all my banks from floppy when somewhere around the 24th bank or so it started making a louder than normal clicking noise (almost grinding) and eventually the Emax couldn't read it anymore.
I messed about with it for a few more hours, reformatted, changed jumper settings etc. but never got it to successfully format or work again. FWIW, that drive had been working fine since the day I bought it new around '90-91 right up until I put it in the Emax. I still have it and maybe I just didn't have it configured properly, but I thought the noise to be pretty suspect and have since moved on to another drive.
I just purchased an IBM WDS L-80meg scsi drive and despite a few jumper questions that I'll get to in a minute, it formatted to near-completion, but as soon as it tried to load bank 01 Untitled I got the dreaded "Hard Disk Error" message and it locked up. Had to reboot to the floppy and then I tried an HD Scan, which reported every bank had errors and it couldn't fix them. Attempts to reformat have failed.
So I am now questioning some of the jumper settings, termination, drive compatibility and operator error. I feel pretty confident I've correctly set the SCSI ID to 0, but I can't confirm the termination settings on the drive.
The hard drive's controller board doesn't quite match the settings diagrams I found for this particular model.
Going by the diagrams referenced above for the option block, it shows 13 pins (pin 7 not present) however on my drive there IS a pin 7. I initially ignored this as I assumed its presence didn't mean it would be used and if I didn't attempt to jump pins 7 &; 8 if figured there'd be no harm. Perhaps this is nothing but I mention it just in case.
I wasn't sure if the "Auto Spin Up Enable" option (jumping pins 9 & 10) was necessary, but it was set initially so I installed/formatted the drive that way the first time. After the failure I removed the jumper to see if it behaved differently w/ the Auto Spin Up off but wasn't able to successfully format the drive this way either.
So the next issue is the termination. I'm using the original SCSI cable that came with the Emax which is only a single-device cable; I'm not sure if it's terminated by virtue of the fact that there's no additional connection on the cable or if the drive requires some explicit termination. The problem is that while the diagram referenced above shows some terminating resistor(s) & jumper options, the controller board on my drive doesn't have anything that resembles jumpers, terminating resistors or even holes for resistors anywhere near the region in the diagram labeled T-Res & J.
Unfortunately, I no longer have any computer that will take a SCSI drive to do any testing outside the Emax.
So my questions are:
- Does the IBM drive meet the basic specs for compatibility?
- Does the extra pin 7 on the option block jumpers raise any red flags?
- Do I need to explicitly terminate it and if so, any suggestions on how I figure out where the resistors/jumpers are?
I've RTFMed and Googled extensively over the past few days and am running out of ideas. Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Jim