I'm wondering what the deal is with SCSI termination. I've never quite understood it. My now inactive Mac Plus has/had a 40MB external hard disk. That machine, HD included, was given to me by my grandfather over 10 years ago. He gave it to me without a terminator on it. I ran it for those 10+ years that way with no problems, as that's the way he apparently ran it. When the power supply on the Plus died, I moved the drive over to my Classic II. After less than a day on the Classic II, I got some sort of disk error while trying to access a file on the external HD. So I rebooted, and ever since the external HD won't show up on the desktop of the Classic II.
I hadn't given it much thought, as a matter of fact, I had only heard of SCSI termination once or twice over the years and never really knew what it's purpose was. For some reason a few days after this it occured to me that no terminator might have been the problem. So I go out and try to find a termintor. This seemingly simple task was much more than I bargained for when I get asked if I want a differential, passive, active, and so on and so forth type of termintor. Not owning any documentation on this, I go with the distributor's recommendation and pick up an "active" terminator. Whatever the hell *THAT* means. I stick the terminator on, and the drive still doesn't show up. So I replace the SCSI cable. Still no drive. So then I download about 9 different SCSI formatting/partitioning/diagnostic utilities and try them all. No luck. They all report some kind of "phase error" or "mode sense" error. These terms mean nothing to me, so I'm wondering if someone out there might know what my problem is. The thing is, all the utilities recognize that the drive is there and report correctly it's make & model number, but when I try to do any sort of drive scan or format I get these errors. I hear the drive spin up when I turn it on, the same sound it has always made, and I hear it even get searched briefly as the Macintosh boots up. So I guess my two questions are: 1) Can not having a SCSI terminator fry your drive's interface hardware somehow? (And if so, why did I run it that way on my Plus for over 10 years with absolutely no problems at all?) and 2) Is the drive salvagable? I've given up hope on every retrieving the data on the drive, but can I at least re-format it so that it will once again hold data? ------------ Nat Hall [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------ -- Compact Macs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/>. Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Compact Macs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/compact.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive:<http://www.mail-archive.com/compact.macs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
