I got an untested SyQuest 88MB removable SCSI drive and some 88MB cartridges are coming soon. I had one of these in the past so this scratching a retro itch for me.
Anyone have modern experience with them? How likely is the drive to work? Do they always fail over time, have known issues, etc?
Also, now that I think about it, I don't think that I've ever played with a 5.25" SyQuest. I have tinkered with the 5.25" Bernoulli Boxes and the later 3.5" form factor SyQuest drives. I gather the SyQuest 5.25" disks are rigid? The Bernoulli Boxes famously used a flexible disk inside the housing.
@steeph Yeah! A big 5.25” disk platter inside a rigid plastic shell. See replies after for a video of a cartridge being inserted. The sounds are quite unique to these disks.
I’ve moved the #SyQuest drive to my trusty PowerMac 8500. I was curious to test if the driver on the disk was PPC only for some reason and this crashed my SE/30. Anytime I try to mount the disk is when problems occur.
Well, the same is true here. SCSIProbe sees it but crashes when I try to mount it.
Trying Norton Disk Doctor 2 and.. it’s reading it! Now trying to recover files. This kinda proves that the disk and drive at least somewhat work? I don’t think there’s anything on these that I would keep, but I’d like to see before I erase it.
@Sonofasailor Yep, works fine! I bought it new when it first came out since it was like $10 cheaper than the IOmega version. I've yet to encounter a Zip drive with the click of death so I consider myself lucky!
I enjoy following your adventures with vintage hardware. Thanks for letting us come along for the ride! (I have a Mac Classic that a friend gave me that I'd love to have restored to working order, but it's beyond the skills of a non-soldering type like me.)
@Sonofasailor It can be tricky at first but it’s possible to pick up the skills. Depending on your location, there might be a maker or hacker space with folks that can assist you. There’s also some retro folks that do repair work as a side job. What are the symptoms of your Classic?
@paulrickards I can hear the hard drive spinning up, and it sounds like the drive head is seeking, but nothing ever appears on the screen. The noises from the drive continue for several moments, pause for a second, and then resume, but that's all it ever does. 🤷♂️
@Sonofasailor Ahh that might be the analog board needs to be recapped (the digital board will likely too). There are some TV-style pots on the rear under a trap door. You can gently raise the brightness to see if you see any change at all on the screen. There’s a diagram on this page:
First #SyQuest disk completed and I’m on the second one now and we’re already 12 hours in the excavation. It’s sooo slow! I wonder what’s going on to make it so slow? 🤔
@compu85@compu85@nulleric It’s kinda working? Mounting it causes issues but Norton seems to be able to read it and try to recover files from it. It’s like the driver on the disk is borked or something.
What can load a custom driver instead of what’s on the disk?
@nulleric Yes that’s with a disk inserted. It kind of works, sometimes, very very slowly. One actually mounted on the desktop briefly but making a disk image was asking too much (waaayy too slow).
I’m wondering if the heads are dirty and if they can be cleaned or if these carts are just bad.
@nulleric Interesting! Theoretically it could be caused by any device on the bus? I’ve been curious about the driver that’s on the disk, because as I remember there’s a driver partition that gets loaded to mount the disk. Could it be PPC only? Is that a thing?
I am in the US and some further testing would be awesome. Thx!
@quadra700 Thanks!! I think this one came from everyone's favorite auction site. It was amongst one of the first things I recapped and surprisingly it worked the first time. It has an internal Ethernet card and a ColorBoard 256 card installed that drives the clear Mac case (acting as a monitor) next to it. It's also running MacOS 8.1 which is verboten! =D
Here's my blog post about it in case it's new to you:
@paulrickards Great website. Thanks for the link. I'd love to have a compact Mac but it is so hard to find a good online. And I am not some who is comfortable recapping. :/
@paulrickards I plugged my old 44mb drive in for the first time in years and years and years a few months back, and it seemed to work just fine! One cartridge was sounding at bit dodgy, but still managed to get all the data off it. Other cartridges seemed just fine.
Obviously just my completely anecdotal experience with a drive that was mine from new and was kept in reasonably okay-ish storage conditions, mind you.
@billgoats Good to know. I wish I kept my SyQuest but I’m pretty sure I sold it to buy a Zip drive instead. I think hearing the sound of it spin up and click will unlock long forgotten memories.
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