I've had a PowerBook 540c for quite some time, but the HD recently failed me. Finding an official Apple replacement is, obviously, almost impossible, but I managed to stumble across a 344MB IBM drive (an H2344-S4), which was the same size and pinout, so I thought I'd give it a go. This drive is being a little strange to me, however. I can hook the Powerbook up to my 9600 with a SCSI dock adaptor, formatted the drive (Mac OS Standard, of course) and install a system on it. This all goes smoothly and everything's happy. Then I tried to boot from it and I just get a blinking question mark…
It's clearly a termination problem, the Mac boots up and runs fine if I've got an external drive connected (and terminated, I used an old ZIP 250). But that's not very portable, and my batteries work.
Therefore I ask the question: Should the PowerBook be terminating the bus itself or it it telling the drive to terminate it via. jumper settings. If it's doing the latter, then that won't work, as according to the drive's manual, it's not got termination resistors (see link below). I don't know if the original drive (a Quantum Go Drice GO16S021) has termination resistors, I don't see anything on the drive which looks like a resistor network, but I guess it could have an on-chip active terminator... (I can't find the manual for that)
Perhaps I could whip out my soldering iron and pop some resistors in for it? The drive's never going to be used for anything else...
P.S. I love how snappy the forum is now!
The SCSI hard drives (originally 160, 240 and 320MB) of the PB 500s series were of the Apple ROM era, which is to say that they needed to be used in conjunction with Apple's HD SC Setup (precursor to Drive Setup) software. Such drives are still available, at a price. Alternatively, you can use LaCie's Silverlining v5.x.x or FWB's Hard Disk ToolKit, both of which will format both Apple-ROMmed and non-Apple drives with the necessary Apple drive-partition scheme, and install suitable drivers. I used Silverlining on all Macs up to the time of (I think) Jaguar, after which it was LaCie's recommendation that Apple's own Disk Utility be used. My own PB 500s have Silverlining-formatted (non-Apple, but IBM-made) drives.
Silverlining (at last glance) was no longer available from LaCie, but if you ask about, skilfully, you should be able to turn a version up.