02-13-2012, 10:45 AM

Ok so here's what I have going on. I have a Macintosh II setup that was given to me recently to try to recover some word documents from the external drive. The Mac works and I was given two external hard drives with it, the hard drives are SCSI. One of the drives is recognized and you can view the files within it from the Mac. The other is not recognized. I can hear it spin up and read, but its not recognized. I've tried just about everything and finally decided to purchase an SCSI to USB converter cable, (Adaptec USBXchange Storage controller), to try with my PC. When I plug everything in I get the green light on the USB cable for the good hard drive, but no light at all for the one that I'm not able to read. I've tried MacDisk and am not able to find either drive on my PC. I'm not a Mac guy, so i'm stumped on this one. Is there any way I can get that drive recognized from either the Mac or the PC? I'm not aware of any Mac tricks to get it re-recongized from the Mac II but i'm willing to try any ideas. I've already done the basics which include: switching the number of the drive via the button on the back, swapping the external drives into each others cases to rule out a bad enclosure, chaining them together, etc. I appreciate any help!

02-14-2012, 04:31 PM

Do you have a SCSI terminator on the drive case. If you switched it to the other case and no joy..sound like its crashed. I had to throw out a SCSI drive the other day...its just no longer worked..just because it spins dosent mean thats its not crashed. You could run SCSI Probe to try and mount the drive...most likely its gone.

02-17-2012, 10:08 AM

Thanks "Mac SK" for the reply. I did try running the SCSI probe yesterday and no avail. I've noticed that when the drive spins up it spins up different than the other one and not as long, so i'm guessing your right and its shot. At least the data on the drive isn't substantially important, so no real big deal. I appreciate your help though, and am glad to hear that you had one of these go bad as well! I don't feel alone! Thanks again.

02-17-2012, 11:07 PM

Ya...The drive I trashed was like an IBM 18gig SCSI came out of a server...most painful to let it go. I still have some old Macs and external drives around...still use a 8600(G3) OS9 sometimes to check email and stuff.