Not surprised that hard drive do and will fail like this, this should do test seeks at start up before SCSI controller initializes before start OS up.

Try one of standard SCSI hard drive instead, don't have to be 60MB. Any thing up to 1GB.

Cheers,

I only have a few vintage SCSI drives. All of them are unfortunately bigger than 1 GB because they come from late 90s machines. Also what makes this particular drive interesting is that it is a time capsule from twenty years ago. It'd be interesting to have a look at what I was doing at the time.

I've been looking at vintage hard drive repair. I might end up opening this one up and having a peek inside - literally.

I'd be cautious about opening it up, probably worth trying to check the drive electronics first. I had someone's old hard drive to try and get working, last span up in 2001. It briefly span up, then stopped. Got lucky and found someone on ebay selling the control pcb for the same model drive (Seagate). Tested out the resistance to the main motor and they looked ok, so I experimented just swapping the boards over. No expectation of it working (drive head parameters are stored on an eeprom, in this case probably embedded in the main head control IC) but I wanted to see if the disk span up and the heads tried to seek, which they did although nothing could be read. Which suggested that the drive was physically ok, so didn't need opening up and exposing to dust.

I then got really lucky and moved the firmware ic from the replacement board to the duff board, and then the drive span up and could image the drive.

Bit rambling, but point being that I think opening the drive should be last resort after checking everything else first.

So I went and found the smallest SCSI hard drive I had and connected it to the PS/2. Oddly enough the 4330 MB drive shows up as a 40 MB drive. I guess the PS/2 has issues with recognizing bigger drives.

Don't know the PS/2, but it looks like it was sold with 320MB as an option:
http://ps-2.kev009.com/pcpartnerinfo/ctstips/27e2.htm

This thread says that the boot drive has to be less than 1GB in a model 70:
https://www.vcfed.org/forum/forum/genres/pcs- … -PS-2-Model-70=

Hmm, I wonder if 4330 happens to be ~40MB past 4GB.
4096 MB * 1,048,576 = 4,294,967,296. Using hard-drive manufacturer maths, that looks like 4295MB. So that reported 40MB could just be how it wraps around when the drive is too big. Do your other disks show up as different sizes?

If you have an access to a vintage Mac, attach the hard drive to the SCSI bus (set a SCSI id different from the IDs of the other attached drives), terminate it, if it is the last drive on the bus and install FWB Hard disk toolkit (preferably version 4.52) on the internal Mac drive. FWB is a very powerful program with many options for testing and formatting SCSI drives. It is possible that the system area had been messed up, and FWB can restore the disk parameters table using its inbuilt library. It has an option for reading the SCSI sense keys among many others. Don't format the drive! If FWB fails, I would assume that the drive controller is dead or it is on its last leg.

As someone who loves these machines, those hard drives are so unreliable, I don't even have a funny analogy to compare them to. They are RELIABLY TERRIBLE. Even new.

Cut your losses. Get a SD/SCSI adapter.

if you want to keep the "sound", leave the hard drive plugged into power, just not data.

Lacking any better ideas, I went ahead and opened the drive.

The first thing I noticed was the discolouring at the edge of the disk surface. "This probably isn't a good sign" went through my head. The actuator arm was unmoving. The heads were stuck so hard it was like it was welded to the disk surface - also probably not a good sign. I got the heads unstuck by manipulating the actuator arm, but the amount of force required to do so was very worrying. In hindsight I should probably also have tried moving the spindle at the same time.

I reassembled the drive and put it into the computer. It made this OouuaAaOouuaAaOouuaAa-kind of sound and then went silent. The drive isn't recognized at all anymore in the SCSI configuration menu. I tried powering the computer off and on a few times, but it made no difference. I took the hard drive top cover off and tried powering it on and the spindle isn't turning. The yellow activity light on the side of the drive is just blinking now and then but nothing is happening. None of the mechanical components are doing anything and it isn't even making that sound it did the first time I turned it on.

I mean, it was broken already so this doesn't make much of a difference. Having watched those YouTube videos though, I kinda hoped that there would have been a simple solution to my issue as well.

yep. this is a very normal outcome of ALL spinning rust drives. i've even seen it happen on "newer" 10-20gb drives.

Normal look of the spluttered plating platters. Not rust which is opaque orange on early hard drives.

Cheers,