Trying to access old SCSI drive with XP

At work we have a stand alone Mac from around 1994 no network access. It just stopped printing and we are worried its about to die and loose all the files on it.

So I found a donor computer, e machine 733i and I installed XP and Foxpro, also an Adaptec 29160 SCSI card with the drive.

The old drive appears to be running Foxpro in DOS on top of Apple 7.5.1 and would like to be able to pull those files off the old drive and transfer them to something more modern.

Now when I boot the e machine I see the drive detected, no errors and comes up in XP. I can see the Fireball drive in device manager, but not under My Computer.

I found two programs I will try Monday Macdrive Pro and UFS-explorer to try. I posted on an XP forum and didn't get much help. I'm not exactly sure how to go about this. I originally tried Ubuntu 8.10 with Wine, but never could get Wine to cooperate, and without a Internet connection and I lost a lot of hair.

Thanks!

If you just want to backup any data files from that old Mac, why not just get one of the USB/FW to SCSI adapters or enclosures, pop out the drive and connect it with either of them and backup to a later Mac?

We only have newer PC's, I have no idea how a Mac ended up where I work. We do have a few Sun's with Solaris on them, but this can not be connected to them. My original thought was to find an intermediate jump in technology to the e machine then get it off of there later. I am trying to do it cheaply.

I can see the Fireball drive in device manager, but not under My Computer.

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First, you're working with ancient equipment if you have a Mac from 1994! Reference the quote above... did you assign the Fireball drive a drive letter from Device Manager? You won't see it in the File Explorer or My Computer until you do.

We just started working there and found our maintenance records for the last 10+ years is on a very early '92 to maybe 94 Mac! I suggested just build a new system and go forward, but no they want the old info saved.

So anyway.. No I did not assign a drive letter. I thought Windows did that automatically. I will go back and look at that Monday.

Thanks!

Sounds like you are doing the right thing but need that XP machine to access the Macs old file system.

That Macs drive is most likely formatted with HFS (sounds like HFS+ used in more modern macs but isn't the same). There is not much support for the old HFS system, although modern macs can still at least read the format.
Hierarchical File System - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I don't think that Windows program (UFS Explorer) supports HFS, only the newer HFS+

You have 3 options.

Give this program a try, HFVExplorer [E-Maculation wiki] if you can get it to work on XP

Otherwise you are right about an intermediate Mac, something like a G4 Powermac with adapted scsi card would do the trick

Otherwise a Linux machine with hfsprogs installed might be able to access the drive http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/hfsprogs

I tried to go with Ubuntu and hsfprogs and then Wine to run Foxpro but failed. I just could not get Wine working. I spent over 2 weeks bring in various versions of Bison, M4, Flex then it needed Xfree, then Libwine.so.1 couldn't be found, AARRGGG!

I just got the HFVExplorer 1.31, thanks I'll give it a try.

Personally I'd suggest that your'e spending your time and resources for a "make work" project, that may not even work if and when you recover the data you want.

Also we have no idea of what software application was used to create the data, and to compound the problem, many applications of that era used both data and resource forks, both of which could hold specific data.

What are you planning to use to access the data if and when you recover the data?

I'd try a different route and try Googling on 'Macs with scsi drives' etc. and then use some of the suggestions from some of the hits such as:
How to recover data from an old SCSI drive | Macworld

I've been there, done that sort of operation and it can be a hassle, and I've still got old working PPC Macs that I can and have used. Complete with communication and USB ports etc., and old Data Vis translators and applicable software etc.

Just saying...

Also we have no idea of what software application was used to create the data, and to compound the problem, many applications of that era used both data and resource forks, both of which could hold specific data

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Actually we do. FoxPro was a database application available at the time for both Mac and Windows. I am not sure which modern programs can read the data files. That may depend upon the data since FoxPro was capable of saving in several formats IIRC.

I am a little more confused by what this means

The old drive appears to be running Foxpro in DOS on top of Apple 7.5.1 and would like to be able to pull those files off the old drive and transfer them to something more modern.

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If the data can be salvaged it will probably be through an intermediate machine. I say that because the USB to SCSI dongles seem to me to not be so reliable under OS X. IIRC the last time I used one was either 10.2 or perhaps earlier. Even then many people were finding them problematic.

If the old machine is still booting properly it might be possible to transfer the files via network.

My two cents .......... I have an HP external drive that is old. Some time after we switched to Windows 7 HP stopped supporting it. We found this out after we had to bring the machine back up from a factory reboot and the drive wouldn't work. It is plug-n-play but when you try to load the drivers now it says that it is no longer supported. Everything about the drive indicates that its working fine but the XP can't find it. IT people have it and are trying to find an older system that may support it.

Hope this helps some.

Sorry, I missed the comment that FoxPro database was being used and both FileMaker Pro and Bento are the closest to Visual Fox Pro that I can think of that still work and may be able to import or use the data.

I never used one of the USB-SCSI adapters, but had (have) a different adapter of wires and connectors w/ power supply as well as an external USB/FW enclosure that could accept both 2.5" and 3.5" SCSI drives and both worked well.

It shows how well built the old SCSI drives were to still be working, but I'd also be curious as to why "It just stopped printing". That seems a bit strange to me.

Anyway, good luck to the OP.

just some thoughts. It may be valid or not. Is that SCSI card an add-on (dumb) or a main controller. It is possible that you may need a terminator on the drive or to be configured. Some genius companies used cabling to assign the drive ID back in the day. I apologize that I am not familiar with your drive. Geez, it has been years since I worked with SCSI. I got my wife's old HP scanner with a dumb SCSI controller under XP. Does it show the drive during bootup?

Wow,

pm -r we need to history to look back at old break fix actions, locate missing equipment etc.
It seems the printer may have died after it was moved, the Mac says the printer is missing when
its connected.

Slydude, It looks to me and I have not dug into it yet, I think it may have a DOS partition on it and
Foxpro may be install on that.

I might have to switch back to Ubuntu and try to get into the drive, then save the info and then install Windows to use Foxpro to use what was recovered. I am starting to get burnt out with this.

I'll dig into it more Monday as long as I don't get pulled off on something else.

Thanks everyone!

Good luck and I'm getting exhausted just by reading what you're going through.

PS: Maybe check the connection and cable used to the printer???

Got it... I installed Macdrive Pro 9.3.x and I was able to go right in and copy all 670 Meg of files out of the SCSI drive. So that is a success.

However I found the main program runs under Mac is probably proprietary software and needs a MAC OS to run it. But I can use Foxpro to look at most of the database, once I figure it out. I might need to look at maybe an emulator.

Anyway thanks everyone I think

Wow. That didn't even occur to me. I was thinking either picking up another Mac or transferring files over a network. I was just having trouble remembering the networking setup.

Barkie said:

Got it... I installed Macdrive Pro 9.3.x and I was able to go right in and copy all 670 Meg of files out of the SCSI drive. So that is a success.

However I found the main program runs under Mac is probably proprietary software and needs a MAC OS to run it. But I can use Foxpro to look at most of the database, once I figure it out. I might need to look at maybe an emulator.

Anyway thanks everyone I think

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Good news and it sounds like you're progressing, but I'm a bit curious as to how you ended up actually accessing and connecting to the SCSI drive????