Loud noise in my Macintosh LC II

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Katakis
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Loud noise in my Macintosh LC II

Post by Katakis »

Hi,
I just acquired an Apple Macintosh LC II last Friday. It powers on fine, you hear the startup chime, and the display/audio is fine. I hear this loud whistling noise coming from inside the unit, and found out that it is coming from Quantum HD installed in it. The platter spins fine, but the arms move in an unusual way. I think it is the rubber located underneath the platter, but I'm not quite sure. I just uploaded a video showing what happens.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiUXfS_eWHU

As you can see, the arm/heads start moving in a erratic way, then they settle near the edge of the platter and that is where the whistling noise comes in, but this gets louder and louder to the point where I have to turn it off. Thoughts?
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adespoton
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Re: Loud noise in my Macintosh LC II

Post by adespoton »

I had a number of Quantum drives from that era catastrophically fail. They were subject to stiction (the bearings seizing up) as well as jitter (the read/write heads bouncing across the platters). I'd recommend replacing the drive with either a SCSI SSD, or an SD or CF adapter, and then just plug in an SD card or CF card.

[edit] http://www.codesrc.com/mediawiki/index. ... le=SCSI2SD
Katakis
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Re: Loud noise in my Macintosh LC II

Post by Katakis »

I read about SCSI2SD earlier and it would be very difficult for me to set up myself, so maybe I will consider getting someone to help me.

I'm going to have the HD repaired sometime after Easter. If it can't, I will consider getting a replacement HD. I have seen heaps of SCSI hard drives on eBay, but would any of them fit, and can I have any capacity?
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24bit
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Re: Loud noise in my Macintosh LC II

Post by 24bit »

Physically, lots of SCSI drives would fit in your Mac.
HFS allows a max. file system of 2TB, so there is room for choices. :)
Electrically it is easiest to fit in a 50PIN device, those have become rare and expensive over the last decades though.
The downside: You will get a very old used device of unknown condition if you buy a 50pin device.

The SCSI standard gives you downward compatibility to your SCSI-1 Mac up to Ultra Wide SCSI, given you fetch a 68 or 80 pin to 50 pin adapter. If you want to stick with rotating platters, I would look for a 68 or 80 pin server drive. Server HDDs were designed for a long life span and chances are that you may find something affordable.
Maybe look for a Seagate Cheetah or similar plus a matching adapter. Such drives were designed for a MTBF of 1.2 million hours.

You will need a third party utility to set up and partition your 18GB or larger HDD.
LIDO is a good one: http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/lido-756
Best make your first and bootable partition slightly smaller than 2GB to be on the safe side.
Last edited by 24bit on Thu Apr 13, 2017 1:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Katakis
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Re: Loud noise in my Macintosh LC II

Post by Katakis »

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24bit
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Re: Loud noise in my Macintosh LC II

Post by 24bit »

The items you picked are looking good to me.
I had 68 pin and 80 pin adapters in my Macs but no such huge drives. 146 GB is a bummer but a Hitachi Ultrastar sure is an option. A new drive for 75 bucks would be a bargain.

Best ask Max1zzz over at Macintoshgarden as he has some experience with SCA drives on vintage Macs.
He may be able to tell what should work by experience.
http://macintoshgarden.org/forum/max1zz ... mac-server
Katakis
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Re: Loud noise in my Macintosh LC II

Post by Katakis »

I sent him a message, but he has not replied to me yet.
The hard drive's capacity is not a problem for me, but so far I have not seen one over 200GB.

Also, just so you know the HD was making the whistle sound just before I brought the machine home with me, but it was much quieter back then.
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Re: Loud noise in my Macintosh LC II

Post by max1zzz »

Sorry for not getting back to you, I did get your message but have been busy lately and haven't had a chance to get back to you

Looking at the video of the original drive I think it is dead unfortunately, when the head is stuck completely you can usually fix it but as the head seems to be moving freely it suggests there is something else wrong with it (The quantum drives are more trouble than they are worth these days anyway, I don't think I have a single working SCSI quantum in my collection)

Looking at the drive and adapter you emailed me there are a couple of problems I see, First that adapter isn't going to fit into the LCII case. However secondly and more importantly I can't see anything in the drives specs that state it supports operating in narrow mode, this doesn't mean it won't - That depends on how you terminate the HDD

The Biggest problem with using 80pin drives is the problem of termination, no 80pin HDD will have built in termination and about 80% of the adapters on the market do not have termination built in (With the remaining 20% that do there are two ways of doing the termination which I will get on to later). With a non terminated adapter you really have two ways terminating the scsi chain, you can use a inline adapter that goes between the scsi cable and the adapter or you can use a external terminator which screws onto the db25 scsi port on the back of the LCII, i'm not a fan of this method as really it breaks the scsi spec (the chain should be terminated at both ends, and while you can get away with it with no external devices connected you may start getting problems if you connect external drives)

Now back onto terminated adapters, there are two types of these, Most adapters sold as having termination terminate only the lower 8 bits of the scsi bus, this works ok for drives that support operating in narrow mode but just flat out won't work on drives that don't. Some adapters terminate all 16 bits of the scsi bus, these will allow some (but not all) drives that don't officially state they work on a narrow bus to work on a narrow bus

Personally I use 2.5" seagate savvio drives with terminated adapters that I have designed and built (Which terminate all 16 bits of the bus - which isn't required for the savvio drives btw, the do support narrow mode) I did sell these adapters at one point - and will have the last few I am producing ready for sale soon

I think have covered everything I know about scsi drives and termination there :) If you have any questions I would be happy to answer them :)
Katakis
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Re: Loud noise in my Macintosh LC II

Post by Katakis »

Thanks for the response, Max. Appeciated.

I have 2 questions.

What exactly is narrow mode? Does it have to do with the termination as well?

Also, unless I install System 7.5.3 on that hard drive, is it true that the extra 144GB will show up as logical volumes of 2GB, since earlier versions only supported a maximum amount of 2GB?
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Re: Loud noise in my Macintosh LC II

Post by max1zzz »

Narrow mode is a feature some morden scsi drives have that allows them to be backward compatible with older scsi buses. A Morden (U320 or U160) drive Operates on a 16bit bus (aka a "wide" bus) whereas the old 50pin drives used in our old macs operate on a 8 bit (or "narrow") bus. On some drives it is dependant on termination, for example I have a 36.4GB 80pin compaq HDD in my IIci which dosen't officially state it works in narrow mode but will if a adapter is used that terminates all 16bits of the bus, However I also have a older 9.1GB compaq drive in my LCII which dose state it supports narrow mode and will work with any terminator I have tried with it

I believe that is true even of System 7.5.3, However your probably won't ever need 146GB of space on a LCII so you can just make a couple of 2GB partitions and leave the rest of the space empty
Katakis
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Re: Loud noise in my Macintosh LC II

Post by Katakis »

Most of the adapters on eBay are cheap but will not fit in an LC II. I found one that is 3.81" x 1.63" x . 4375", but it's more expensive than the others.

This is off-topic, but I tried to insert a 720KB floppy disk in the LC II drive, only to be greeted by "This i not a Macintosh disk" message, so I assume that it only takes 1.44MB floppies. In that case, can I use regular 1.44's to uncompress images from the Macintosh Garden onto disks and use them in the LC II, as an alternative to FEMU (FloppyEMU)?
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24bit
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Re: Loud noise in my Macintosh LC II

Post by 24bit »

For your off-topic:
The factory floppy of your LC II was a HD one. To read PC formatted floppies there was an add on. (PC-Exchange)
With that you may read/write 1.4MB (Mac+DOS), 800k (Mac), 720k (PC). Also you may read Mac 400k.
The PC floppy read/write ability was rolled into the OS, I think with 7.5.
For earlier MacOS the PC-Exchange package was available separately.
http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/pc-exchange
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