Question on SCSI hard disk

[JoeG]

I acquired a vintage PC that came with a Seagate 157N SCSI hard disk. The drive is flashing 7 times when trying to activate, which per the manual is: "Read Sector ID Mark: If the controller Is unable to find and read an ID mark for any sector, seven flashes are returned with an additional sense code of 88H."

The drive is configured with default jumper settings (ID:0), and the Adaptec controller is also configured with default jumpers. The floppy drives work fine via the Adaptec controller as well. the CMOS is set for no hard drives.

When the PC tries to access the SCSI disk, I get a quickly disappearing error of "Target 0 ......", then it boots from a floppy. I can't really hear the drive spin up on power up, but it does make a short clicking noise now and then.

Now it's been quite a while since I actually worked on IBM PC clones, so I'm dusting off brain cells as I go. My question is based on the accompanying photo. Is the tab shown supposed to be making contact with the spindle below it? I don't recall seeing one like this before. It seems like it's more of a grounding tab than anything else.

Does anyone know the answer to my question?

Thank you!

Joe


   

[JoeG]

Please disregard.

I used Deoxit on the spindle, let it set, then used hemostats to gently turn the spindle back and forth a few times, and hit it again with Deoxit. I let it set a little bit, then powered on the computer.

The drive spun up, and it's loading DOS 6.22 now.

I got lucky!

Joe

[Ren]

(11-12-2024 09:48 PM)JoeG Wrote:  Is the tab shown supposed to be making contact with the spindle below it? I don't recall seeing one like this before. It seems like it's more of a grounding tab than anything else.

SCSI?
Oh great, another part of my brain has developed stiction!
Anyway, I do believe the tab is for grounding the spindle.
Good luck getting any info off of the drive, I wouldn't trust it to run again!
Ren
dona nobis pacem

[KeithB]

(11-12-2024 11:00 PM)JoeG Wrote:  Please disregard.

I used Deoxit on the spindle, let it set, then used hemostats to gently turn the spindle back and forth a few times, and hit it again with Deoxit. I let it set a little bit, then powered on the computer.

The drive spun up, and it's loading DOS 6.22 now.

I got lucky!

Joe

Good job, and you didn't even need to sacrifice the goat!

I am proud to say, that I no longer have any SCSI gear, I got rid of my SCSI Zip drive a long time ago. Though I wonder if I could have hooked it up to my new iMac via:

SCSI-> SCSI to Firewire -> Firewire to TB1 -> TB1-TB2 -> Mac

Almost wish I could try it...

[brouhaha]

(11-13-2024 02:11 PM)KeithB Wrote:  I am proud to say, that I no longer have any SCSI gear, I got rid of my SCSI Zip drive a long time ago. Though I wonder if I could have hooked it up to my new iMac via:
SCSI-> SCSI to Firewire -> Firewire to TB1 -> TB1-TB2 -> Mac

I still use Ultra SCSI 320 LVD drives in my HP Workstation C8000 (PA-RISC, fore cores, 1.0 GHz). It supports SCSI or IDE, but not newer interfaces. I tried using a SATA SSD with an IDE (PATA) to SATA adapter, but such a high percentage of bytes transferred get errors that even just identifying the drive gives incorrect information.

I could use e.g. a BlueSCSI, but that only does 8-bit-wide single-ended "fast" SCSI, so the maximum transfer rate is 10 megabytes per second, only 3% of the burst transfer rate of Ultra-320. On the other hand, there'd be essentially no seek time. I do use BlueSCSI in HP 16700 series logic analyzers, which are PA-RISC based but only have 8-bit fast SCSI.

SCSI Ultra-160 (and maybe even Ultra-320) drive emulators exist for industrial use, but cost really big bucks.

I've got a 10G Ethernet card (HP AD385A) in the C8000, so it has faster network bandwidth than disk bandwidth!