Q950 Hard Drive & External Drive

Sniffy

Sniffy

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Newbie dropping by for help. Apologies if I'm in the wrong forum.
I have an elderly Q950 with an external hard drive with everything backed up onto it. The external drive is a Micronet ADV1000E, with a sticker on the back saying it's Macintosh or PC compatible. I also have an iBook laptop, & PC Dell Inspiron 1300 laptop. As I have the 2 laptops, the Quadra hadn't been switched on for maybe one year. On the weekend I tried to get it to boot up (with & without the external drive switched on), but all it does is display a grey screen with an image of a 3.5" disk with a '?' in the middle. If I start up from a Norton 3.5" disk it still can't find the external or internal drive. If I try booting up with my finger in the shift key it doesn't want to know.
So, my questions:
1. Any idea why the Quadra isn't seeing either the external or internal drive & what can I try to do?
2. Is there any way I can connect my external drive to either my iBook or Dell? At the moment I have no cables to connect the old & new - are cables available & if so any idea where from? I've looked high & low but so far no joy.
3. Is it possible to remove the hard drive from the Quadra or the external drive & put in an external drive enclosure, then connect that to either laptop? I see there are drive enclosures available which are Mac & pc compatible. This by the way would be a major undertaking for me. I'm by no means a computer dunce but would be wary of trying it.

Thanks,

Janet.
 
Nice piece of hardware you have there. I've always loved the Quadra 950's case and abundance of Nubus slots. I have a Quadra 650 myself that's been going great for years now and is running as a web server using MacHTTP and Mac OS 8.1.

Anyways, have you checked to make sure you don't have them on the same SCSI ID numbers? Also, are you sure that the external drive is terminated?

As for taking those drives and connecting them to your iBook or PC, you may have to use some sort of SCSI-to-USB adapter. Be aware of the number of pins that the SCSI interface is using on either hard drive as well. As it is, they seem to be hard to find since this was the only thing I could locate on the web.

As for external enclosures, there were only a handful that I found on NewEgg.com. Check this list out and one of these might suit you:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...escription=SCSI enclosure&bop=And&Order=PRICE

Good luck.
 
Thanks for your reply. I seem to be making some progress - I took the external drive into work today, a computer boffin opened it up, & said the internal connections are the same as standard drives nowadays. Sooo, looks like I can buy something like this http://www.amazon.co.uk/3-5-Externa...bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=gateway&qid=1201629854&sr=8-1 open up my external drive, unplug & remove the actual drive, plug it into the new caddy, then it can be plugged into my Mac or pc laptop via USB. Boffin did mention mine is probably an IDE, which the one on Amazon also mentions.

Your comments.. SCSI ID numbers, is the drive terminated ... sorry, means nothing to me but none of the Quadra stuff had been moved/unplugged - just left alone in the corner of the spare bedroom to gather dust. The SCSI to USB adapter, I did see some on eBay but the SCSI end looked the opposite if what I would need, meaning this one http://cgi.ebay.com/USB-to-SCSI-Ada...ryZ31494QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem has an identical socket to the one on the back of my external drive.

One question you can hopefully answer while I'm here - I'm not sure what version of OS is on my Quadra but it's about 11 years old. I see the above caddy is OS 9.x/X compatible. I would only need to copy over stuff like letters, jpgs etc, no software. If the OS of the Quadra is below OS 9 would all the data I want to copy over from the external drive be readable on the iBook? I should think so. Another question while I'm here. The letters I have on my Quadra are in PageMaker, not Word. (please don't laugh, but I really liked it). Should I be able to open them in Word on my iBook?

Thanks for your help, I really appreciate it.
 
YEs, the Quadra uses a 68040 processor which is the the last in a series of Motorola's 68000-series processors Apple used before they switched over to PowerPC. Your Quadra and mine have that processor. Also, the slots that are in there are Nubus slots. Apple didn't use PCI slots until the second generation of PowerPC Macintosh systems.

As for the SCSI ID, I brought that up because each device that's connected to the SCSI chain (either internally or externally) requires an ID number. The following page has some quick and useful information regarding SCSI, the ID numbers for the SCSI devices in the chain, and termination for your SCSI chain. Pay close attention to Page 3 for the ID numbers and termination, but be sure to read the entire thing.
http://www.pcnineoneone.com/howto/scsi1.html

As for the hard drive, it is most definitely SCSI and not IDE. The person who checked out your hard drive obviously has no clue, so don't even bother getting that first item you linked to. Also, the Quadra 950 is compatible with up to Mac OS 8.1. It can even run Apple's first commercial Unix operating system called A/UX. Here's more information on your Quadra 950 and A/UX, respectively.

http://www.lowendmac.com/quadra/quadra-950.html
http://aux-penelope.com/

You'll note that A/UX seems hauntingly similar to what we have in Mac OS X today. ;)
 
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As for your documents, I don't think Word would be able to open PageMaker documents at all. Now, if you had a newer version of an Adobe product that is comparable to PageMaker, then it should be able to convert it and open. I do believe there was a version of PageMaker for OS X, but it might have been a while ago.
 
Now I'm getting a tad confused. Are we both talking about my external ADV100E drive? That's the one I want to open & use in my new gear - not the one in my Q960 tower. Chris (who is very computer savvy) opened the ext drive up, looked at the connectors inside, opened up the HP tower at work & showed me the drive in that (the squarish black thing). He said the connections are the same, so I'm guessing I could in theory plug the drive from my external drive in that. I'm now thinking of this http://www.amazon.co.uk/External-Bl...&n=560798&s=electronics&qid=1201636955&sr=8-5

I can by the way email some piccies of my external drive if that would help.

Gotta run, thanks again. I'll check out those other links tonite.
 
OK, I got a bit confused myself. I thought you were talking about the drive in the Quadra 950. Still, after doing a bit of research online I found out that the Micronet ADV1000E is an external SCSI drive, which would mean that the drive internally is also SCSI. The drive itself inside the enclosure should specify if it's IDE or SCSI. While the connections might look the same at first glance, you have to be very careful. SCSI drives can have either 50-pins, 68-pins, or 80-pins. An IDE drive is typically 40-pins and would have jumpers for Master, Slave, and Cable Select. SCSI drives do not have those options....the only options they would have would be for selecting the SCSI ID using jumpers or some other way.

This link should help you identify the difference between a SCSI drive and an IDE drive more easily.
http://www.obsolyte.com/faq/
 
Sniffy said:
Managed to get into my external drive again, unplugged the wider cable, & from looking at the link you gave me, it's a 50 Pin SCSI (oops). I've already ordered a http://www.amazon.co.uk/External-Bl...&n=560798&s=electronics&qid=1201636955&sr=8-5 is it no good? I'm trying to cancel it but looks I'm too late & will have to return it. What will work now?
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, this won't work with your SCSI drive. However, you could use it with another drive for one of your other computers if you have spare IDE hard drives. However, you might want to check out the ones I linked for you from NewEgg. They're a bit pricey and usually are meant to hold more than one SCSI drive, but at this point it seems like the only option.

I would say keep it just in case...if not, you will probably have to RMA it.
 
I managed to cancel the drive order, & have also asked the place if they have what I need. In the meantime I'll check out the link you gave me again. I'm in the UK btw, but at least I'll know what's out there & what I'll hopefully find over here.
 
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