Coaxing a Mac 9600 hard drive back to life.

[super teaboy87]

Hello all.

First off I just want to say I am not a highly computer literate person.

I am working with two mac 9600 computers one does not power up and the other powers up but I can't see anything on the monitors.

I need to get the data off the hard disk drives. The oldest operational machine I have access to is a Mac G4 computer.

Is there such a thing as a female ribbon connector for a mac 9600 hard drive to a usb plug

If not What would people suggest I do to get these hard drives going again?

Looking Forward to your answers.

Cheers.

 

[David Schmidt]

Those were some big, fast System 7 computers back in the day. It would be good to get them going again.

So, your options for external connection to USB are slim - adapters are hard to come by these days and tend to be expensive. See this thread in another forum as an example of someone doing the same thing:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2276925

The options seem to be to get yourself a chain of adapters to fit between the drive(s) (you'll have to remove it/them from the Powermac 9600) and the modern computer, or pick up a newer SCSI adapter card you plug into your modern computer, or get some professional services to do the data transfer for you.

Which ever way you go, it's going to involve some screwdriver-turning on your part, and likely some investment in goods+time or services.

 

[MacTech68]

IIRC, some 9600's came with wide SCSI drives and card. The drive's connector is a D shape and has 68 pins (plus power connector). These would require something akin to an Adaptec 2940U(W) PCI SCSI card.

If they are the standard old narrow SCSI 50 pin (two rows of 25), then you should be able to use something as basic as an Adaptec 2906 PCI SCSI card in the G4 Tower.

Of course, you can always try to solve the 9600's issue with the display. What make/model of display are you using?

In all, it may be easier if you can already transfer from the G4 tower to your chosen final destination for the data, since transferring data from the 9600 may be a little more problematic.

 

[super teaboy87]

thanks for the responses. I managed to get the thing working by swapping out the power supplies. The graphics on the one that was dead are still a little bit dicky So I will tinker around with swapping out the cards from another machine knocking around.

So I'm fairly confident we will be able to get the machines up and running and we will be able to transfer our lost files to CD.

Quite interesting the machine has a load of old Protools Mix cards with a digi 888 so i might start a bit of a retro digital recording experiment.

 

[David Schmidt]

That's the spirit! Good job getting it going again.

 

[super teaboy87]

Well things went from looking quite rosie to worse than ever yesterday as the power supply gave up the ghost. Only one side of it was working. It then gave a rather large shock to the technician looking at it.

I found some other power supplies on the internet so I might look at buying those. Before I do that does anyone know if I can connect up the hard drives so I can get them to be read over a USB wire.

 

[MacTech68]

There were a couple of SCSI to USB adapters available years ago when Apple first began shipping the original iMac.

I have one. A Microtech. They are disgustingly flaky, and are slow since they are only USB 1.0 speed. I believe the only work with MacOS 8.x or Windows98 - they don't work on MacOS X

Your best bet really seems to be getting the SCSI card for the G4.

Try a search for AVA-2906 on eBay.

 

[David Schmidt]

I found some other power supplies on the internet so I might look at buying those.

If you'd rather just get the data off than collect more retro gear, give me a shout via private message (after you make one more post... you need a post count of 5 to enable PMs).

Before I do that does anyone know if I can connect up the hard drives so I can get them to be read over a USB wire.

No, not really. As MacTech68 points out, casual SCSI connections do not practically exist. You'll need to set up (or repair) a box to get access to the drives.