I have a MAC classic board which will boot and workfine from a floppy drive but the second I connect a hard drive via internal ribbon or external connector the system just sits forever without progressing to even the floppy drive. Is the SCSI chip toast or could it be something else? I did try the ROM from another Classic board and it made no difference.
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Make sure you have SCSI terminators (resistors) on the drive. If you already do, then play around with different termination and drive combinations.
Yeah Tom I already tried that. Lots of cables and terminators and The same hardware and cables works fine on another machine. While its scanning the SCSI bus its supposed to move on or timeout eventuallty right? Its not meant to stay there for an hours and a half?!
No, it sounds like it's freezing. Does it freeze even if there's no power to the drive?
I'd try probing the bus with a tool like SCSIprobe or similar. Can it probe the bus and does it see the Mac on it?
Well its not really freezing as the mouse cursor still can move. ITs more like stalling. Again, if nothing is plugged into the SCSI bus the machines bypasses and moved onto the floppy drive. Even unpowered devices still plugged into the scsi buss cause the hang.
Unpowered devices should have a high impedance to the SCSI signal lines (not affect them). It sounds as if there is a problem with termination even though you used a terminator, because there is no power for the terminator to work. Is the termpower fuse blown? I think that's F1 on the Classic. Do you have any of the active terminators with a barrel jack for power?
With no functioning termination, there can be ringing such that when the initiator probes for devices on the bus, it receives noise and goes into an invalid state.
No I dont own a powered terminator. Do we have a schematic of the Classic to show me exactly which fuse is related to termination?
i believe there are 3 fuses on the board.
What about an active terminator with a LED? The LED is an indicator that the terminator is getting powered from (some device on) the bus.
F1 is just the fuse closest to the SCSI port, I didn't check a schematic.
No Im afraid I dont even have a terminator with an LED either. So I think maybe I should test these board fuses. IS there a schematic?
There are cleaned scans of the BOMARC schematics here: https://archive.org/download/Macintosh68kSchematics
The Classic is one of them. It shows that termpower is supplied through diode D3, and bypass caps C7 and C52, and the external port protected by fuse F1. The internal port is unfused.
if the internal port in unfused that negates the whole issue of the termination being culprit then right?
A fault could also be in the diode or capacitors
the board has been recapped. I can test the diodes, thats easy enough. What diode(s) is associated with the SCSI bus?
The diode is D3, directly next to fuse F1.
thanks Robespierre, I tested F1 and F2 ( I dont know why I thought there were 3?), both fuses are fine. Diode D3 is also behaving properly.
I found a seller on ebay with a SCSI terminator with diag leds, I am trying to come to an agreed price with them.
I bought this to help diagnose the SCSI issue: https://www.ebay.com/itm/373673811451
I have not seen that device before, but it looks like what you need.
The (one sheet) instructions are at SCSI Power Sniffer
To check termination power, the TRM light should be on. When the Classic probes the bus you should see SEL blink.
Note that although the instructions talk about hot-plugging devices, you still need to use extreme caution.
Glad its the right thing. I will post back when I get it. Thank you for the link to the pdf.
Ok so I am at a loss. I just go back to this today and using the power sniffer all I see is the term power LED and BSY LED are on and thats it. The Term pwr led is a tad les bright thatn the bsy LED but its not that dim. Im no better off than I was before. What can I do now? This is really disheartening.
Im going to take a break from this since I really dont know what to try next besides replacing the SCSI IC. Please anyone with any advice on why the SCSI bus is not working let me know.
Im going to work on a very burned Mac II board now.... at least that ones has.. well "Potential", I have had nothing but bad luck with The MAC classics'. I have repaired horribly broken MAC II boards,, but the Classic... seems they just dont want to live. :(
The TRM and BSY lights show that the Classic is supplying termination power to the bus (good) and attempting arbitration (good). What happens next should be that the host wins arbitration and asserts SEL to probe for target devices. At that point BSY should go out.
What seems to be happening instead is that BSY stays lit? That could mean that there is a short between data lines either in the cables or on the board, or a bad SCSI chip. The host chip asserts BSY and its own ID (data bit 7) and waits reads the bus back to see if any bit is set other than 7, meaning that there was contention and it didn't win arbitration. At which point the cycle repeats.
I should say that the doc for the Sniffer doesn't say how much stretching it does of the signal so I don't know if you can see brief phase transitions that only normally last a microsecond.
Also you want the switch on "safe", that turns on the FPT termination inside the plug.
I have tried 3 different cables and 3 different terminators and two known good external hard drives and an internal blueSCSI. They all do the same thing. Term led and bsy LED are always on. IF there are any resistors (resistor packs) on the mainboard which could possibly affect this let me know. I have a dead classic board I can salvage a SCSI chip from but I like to try all avenues first. I just dont get it this board is super clean! I cant believe the scsi bus has an issue.
There aren't any resistors relevant to the SCSI bus on the Classic board, in fact there is nothing protecting the SCSI chip at all; it connects directly to the internal and external SCSI ports and they are tied together.
So if there is ever any ESD on the SCSI pins (from hot-plugging a cable or device, or other possible causes), the SCSI chip takes the full brunt of it. It's not a robust design.
It also shares the property of other early Mac SCSI ports that there is no on-board termination; the only way both ends of the SCSI bus would be terminated like it's supposed to be is if there are terminators at the end of both internal and external SCSI chains. When only the internal disk is connected, the other end just reflects the signal. This was "normal" and people lived with it despite not being compliant with the spec. When the IIfx came out and required an external terminator, they acted like that was all weird.
so its a fair assumption that the SCSI chip has failed then if thats how poorly implemented the SCSI bus is on this unit. Well I have needed to buy a hot air rework system.
So the General consensus is bad SCSI chip at this point? Cant be anything else i suspect?
Well i bought my first hotair rework station. So Im going to swap the scsi chip on this board and see how that goes as I dont think there are any other options now.
Of course the chinese made hot air station arrived broken :) Need to file a return now..
So I ended up buying a Zilog variant of the SCSI chip from Mouser: https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/ZiLOG/Z53C8003VSG?qs=FsLZlD%252B%252Bd9cJEZW2nIhyXQ%3D%3D
After I installed the Scsi chip I am getting the sSame exact problem. But now my machine is only reporitng 512KB with no expansion RAM card installed. And 2048KB with the expansion ram card! What gives? I am starting to think the problem was something other than the scsi chip all along and now its manifesting in the RAM? What do I do now? This machine is frustrating me so much and I already sunk all this time and money into it.