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Need Files off Power Mac 7500

MGaddict

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Nov 25, 2017
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DC area
Neighbor of mine said he had a few old computers sitting around. I could have them if I would try to get his files off of them for him. Having no clue what types of computers they were, I said no problem figuring worse case, I end up with some junk but I help out a neighbor.
Turned out 2 of the systems were XP and Vista systems which were really easy to deal with.
The 3rd was a Power Macintosh 7500. He had the keyboard, mouse, monitor, an external HDD, printer, midi controller, piano keyboard, external Mac CD, boxes of software, and a few other pieces. This looked awesome, I couldn't pass that up.
Problem, I have no clue how to work on a Mac. I've rebuilt Osbornes, Tandys, NECs, Sun servers, etc. But I've never owned or used a Mac outside of high school to type a paper.
Don't get me wrong, I have found all the documentation I can, I've tried everything and either, the hdds are corrupt, which is totally possible, or, I'm missing something, which is equally possible.
I don't have another system to swap components with. My only other SCSI adapter is a decade newer, wrong connectors, and running Solaris, so it's not going to read the drives even if I could hook them up.
Any suggestions are appreciated. I am going to VCF East on Sunday. I was thinking of bringing the system with me, minus the monitor, and seeing if somebody could help me out. I just have no clue where to turn. Even if I find a SCSI to USB adapter, I don't know how to read the drives. Somebody gave me a link to an old HFS for linux site. And if I had an adapter, I might go that route. I feel like that's kind of a last resort.
Best I can get from being inside this thing, it's been upgraded, a LOT. It has an upgraded CPU card. 2 hdds internally, and about 32MB of RAM. It was booting to the Welcome to Mac splash screen and then just sitting there. It was the screen with no version number. So I'm guessing either 7.6 or 8.0. I didn't change anything that I can figure out, but now it just has a grey screen with mouse in the upper left corner and does nothing.
 
If the machine is getting stuck on a grey screen with just the mouse cursor, it could be a hardware fault, or a problem with the SCSI/IDE bus.

Pretty much every Apple machine from the late 80s to the 2000s using SMD electrolytics is going to have leaked by now, or will soon be leaking and causing havoc. The same is true with the power supplies. You should carefully inspect the logic board in the machine and look for wetness, oily deposits and/or corrosion on capacitor legs and components around capacitors. If you find any of these signs, the logic board needs to be recapped immediately. No other diagnostics should be performed before the logic board and power supply are recapped, because you'll be chasing ghosts. You should also remove the PRAM battery if it hasn't leaked already, because it will probably do so eventually.

As for the SCSI/IDE bus, if you have marginal hard drives, or a marginal power supply that is malfunctioning from failing capacitors, it can cause hard drives to go into a state of funk and lock up the SCSI/IDE bus so the machine won't boot properly.
 
The 7500 is a SCSI based machine. There are IDE and SATA PCI cards available but I assume you are using SCSI.

How long did you let the system run? Sometimes if you have a network share the machine might try to find it for a long time. There could also be control panels looking for hardware that was removed.

Leaky capacitors can cause stability issues but they generally just keep macs from running at all or not shutting down (depending where the capacitors are leaking).

Go find an ISO online for Mac OS 8.1 or 9.1, burn it on a PC, put it in the CDROM drive and hold down the C key after you power it up and see if it boots from that. If so the two hard drives should show up in the OS screen and you can then worry about moving them. You can also try disconnecting one HD then the other incase both drives have bootable OS on them and one actually works.
 
The 7500 is a SCSI based machine. There are IDE and SATA PCI cards available but I assume you are using SCSI.

How long did you let the system run? Sometimes if you have a network share the machine might try to find it for a long time. There could also be control panels looking for hardware that was removed.

Leaky capacitors can cause stability issues but they generally just keep macs from running at all or not shutting down (depending where the capacitors are leaking).

Go find an ISO online for Mac OS 8.1 or 9.1, burn it on a PC, put it in the CDROM drive and hold down the C key after you power it up and see if it boots from that. If so the two hard drives should show up in the OS screen and you can then worry about moving them. You can also try disconnecting one HD then the other incase both drives have bootable OS on them and one actually works.
I am not familiar with how Mac handles SCSI. My only experience has been with Sun servers/workstations. I am making the assumption that, since the previous owner was given this computer already upgraded and he basically knows nothing about computers from talking to him, that he never messed with any of the jumpers. So I'm assuming they are already set up. Can I just disconnect 1 drive? Or am I going to need to find a terminator for the SCSI cable? Any suggestions on where to find a good ISO? Looks like apple is issuing take down orders everywhere or something because every link I found was dead. Winworld claims to have ISOs but I couldn't seem to get any of those to burn successfully from either Windows or Linux, so I don't know if I need to do something special to burn a macos CD, or the ISOs on winworld are bad.

To better define what I've done so far....
I broke down the system completely inspecting every centimeter for any signs of anything damaged, leaking, etc.
I plugged in the power supply and tested all the rails to make sure that all appeared to be correct. Since I can't find pinouts, all I can say is, I found several 5v lines, 12v, and -5 or -12, I can't remember. But nothing looked out of whack.
I cleaned all the connectors with deoxit, removed any dust, from which there was a LOT, and made sure everything was connected back the way I found it. Again, would be nice if I could figure out how this was supposed to be originally configured so I could check jumper settings and RAM slot placement, etc. I'm using my best guess based on the fact that the previous owner said it worked fine when he retired the system about 20 years ago.
I have tried to just disconnect 1 drive and power it on, that's when I stopped getting the welcome screen. Hooking that drive back up didn't get it to that point again. So I tried just connecting the other hd. No luck.
I'm wondering if the external hd might have the OS installed. That seems like a long shot, but if the previous owner upgraded the OS at some point, only God knows what he did.
I can't find any documentation on the Lacie Tsunami external drive although I can find tons of them for sale on the second hand market. This makes things a pain because I have no idea how to check the dip switches on the back which could have very easily been messed with while being handled.

The pain is that since I don't have another machine, I don't have a way of testing out individual parts to isolate the problem.
If somebody has a link to a good ISO for somewhere between MacOS 7.5 and 8.1, I would really appreciate it. Based on the welcome screen I did have, I know it has one of those versions. I suppose 8.1 would be the safest bet just incase the file system was upgraded to HFS+. (See I've done my research.)
Also, if anybody has pictures or something of how this thing is supposed to be set-up stock, I would love that. Perhaps a link with documentation on how to install a 820-0780 150mhz upgrade card. I would be forever in your debt. It looks like Apple has always kept a closed lip on this type of documentation. Even the service manual just says take it to a specialist. Well what the heck is the service manual for if it doesn't tell you how to service the machine?

I'm rambling, but last note: All the plastics in this thing are so brittle, every single plastic tab that is supposed to flex to allow you to insert/remove components, has broken. Every single one of them. I'm either going to have to buy a 3d printer as I'm told all the parts are available on thingyverse, or I'm going to spend hours with epoxy fixing them all. It's no wonder people don't restore these systems more often and they go for pennies on ebay compared to any other vintage computer.
 
SCSI dip switches aren't that complicated, especially on old 8 bit SCSI. The ID pins are a bit mask where you can set the ID from 0-7. On external SCSI devices, there's usually only the bit mask and SCSI termination exposed to the user.

You'll want to make sure that there isn't an ID conflict on the bus, where both drives will assert themselves with the same ID and neither drive will be accessible by the host SCSI adapter. Macintosh machines use SCSI ID 0 for the first boot device and will work their way up to ID 6 if no boot device is found. ID 7 is the SCSI adapter in the Macintosh.

As for issues with burned CD install media, you have to remember that CD-Rs were an emerging new technology in the 90s, there were many drives on the market that were never designed to read CD-Rs, and the ones that did had a lot of trouble doing it because of competing standards and speed ratings. You may have to experiment with different CD-R media, and choke down the burning speed to as low as it will go. I have several SCSI CD-ROM drives where I have to burn media at 4x speeds for it to be reliably read by those drives.

Another problem is with the CD-ROM drivers on Mac OS. Apple's CD-ROM drivers were pretty bad, and also only supported Apple branded drives with Apple firmware. You may have to use a third party extension like SCSI Probe, MT. Everything or FWBs CD-ROM Toolkit for things to work reliably.

The ISOs on Winworld are a mixed bag. Some of them work, but there are quite a few that don't. There's nothing special you need to do to burn them on a Windows or Linux machine, any burning software should work fine.
 
New update. I connected the external Apple CD and the external HDD. I disconnected the Quantum drive inside the machine, and it booted as long as I dissabled everything. I can't seem to open or run anything as it keeps complaining that the disk which contains the original item could not be found. I'm assuming that's the Quantum drive I left disconnected. (This was after trying 500 different configurations, trying memory in different slots, hooking up this, leaving that out, etc. Somehow I have to have the external peripherals connected.)
So now I have to figure out if that quantum drive can be resurected. I can clearly hear it spinning and the drive head moving on it. So unless it had a head crash, I think its working. I need to figure out the jumper settings on that because there are no labels on it and there are multiple headers for jumpers. While I haven't messed with them, I can't assume a jumper hasn't fallen off in the last 20 years. The Apple drive is ID 0, the CDROM is 3, and I think the external HDD is 4, but I'm guessing based on what I think the dip switches mean. So I assume the quantum drive should be 1 or 2.
 
You probably have a SCSI ID conflict. External SCSI devices should never be ID 0 or 1 on Macs with internal drives because those are used by internal hard drives.

Remove and check the Quantum hard drive's SCSI ID to make sure that the CD-ROM drive and it aren't conflicting.

As for the "Application program that created it could not be found" error, it sounds like you have file system corruption going on. I'd recommend running Norton Disk Doctor and Disk First Aid to fix any problems with the file system, which it sounds like there are. Apple's HFS and HFS+ filesystems are not fault tolerant, any system crash or improper shutdown can cause massive filesystem corruption. Having NDD and Disk First Aid always on hand is a must.
 
If you give us the model no. of the quan tum scsi hdd it shouldn't be too hard to find the jumper settings on the interweb.
 
SCSI dip switches aren't that complicated, especially on old 8 bit SCSI. The ID pins are a bit mask where you can set the ID from 0-7. On external SCSI devices, there's usually only the bit mask and SCSI termination exposed to the user.

You'll want to make sure that there isn't an ID conflict on the bus, where both drives will assert themselves with the same ID and neither drive will be accessible by the host SCSI adapter. Macintosh machines use SCSI ID 0 for the first boot device and will work their way up to ID 6 if no boot device is found. ID 7 is the SCSI adapter in the Macintosh.

As for issues with burned CD install media, you have to remember that CD-Rs were an emerging new technology in the 90s, there were many drives on the market that were never designed to read CD-Rs, and the ones that did had a lot of trouble doing it because of competing standards and speed ratings. You may have to experiment with different CD-R media, and choke down the burning speed to as low as it will go. I have several SCSI CD-ROM drives where I have to burn media at 4x speeds for it to be reliably read by those drives.

Another problem is with the CD-ROM drivers on Mac OS. Apple's CD-ROM drivers were pretty bad, and also only supported Apple branded drives with Apple firmware. You may have to use a third party extension like SCSI Probe, MT. Everything or FWBs CD-ROM Toolkit for things to work reliably.

The ISOs on Winworld are a mixed bag. Some of them work, but there are quite a few that don't. There's nothing special you need to do to burn them on a Windows or Linux machine, any burning software should work fine.
I have 5 SCSI devices.
-Internal Apple/Conner HD (No jumpers present so that's ID 0 IAW the manual.)
-Internal Quantum HD (No jumpers present so I'm assuming that means ID 0 but I can't find documentation to confirm. Optional jumpers are labeled 8, 4, 2, and 1)
-Internal AppleCD 600i (jumpers are present on Parity, ID 0 and ID 1 as well as Prevent/Allow, whatever that means. So I have no clue what jumpers on ID0 and 1 means the ID is set to.)
-External AppleCD 600E (Absolutely no clue why there are 2 CD roms. But it is definitely set to ID 3 because this one just has a number with plus and minus buttons to set it.)
-External Lacie Tsunami HD (dip switches are as follows, 1=0, 2=1, 4=0, T=0. I can't find any documentation for this either.)

Somehow, this all works if I just remove the internal quantum drive. But then the computer is looking for all the files and programs on a drive it can't find.

I haven't gotten to the point of trying to read the CD. The burns keep failing when attempting to close the CD. I've wasted a few CDs already on 2 different burners. I'm going to VCF East on Sunday, one of the vendors is supposed to have the disks for sale, so I may just buy a copy from him while I'm there if he isn't asking some stupid price for them.

And as I'm reading all this back before hitting post, I think all this just clicked in my stupid brain. options are 8, 4, 2, and 1 because I can do none = 0, 1=1, 2=2, 2+1=3, 4=4, 4+1=5, 4+2=6, 4+2+1=7, 8=8. The exact same logic applies to the Lacie drive and the AppleCD 600i. *face palm*
Thank you for helping me to talk this out. I'll try this and get back to you guys.
 
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Somehow, this all works if I just remove the internal quantum drive. But then the computer is looking for all the files and programs on a drive it can't find.

As I already told you, you have a SCSI ID conflict. This is why nothing works with the internal drive plugged in, it is conflicting with one of the external drives. You need to stop plugging in everything all at once when you don't know what the SCSI ID of the devices are.

And for the other error "application program that created it could not be found" is NOT because of missing drives, it is because of either file system corruption or whatever file you're trying to open not being associated with a program. The only way that error would happen with a missing drive is if whatever you were clicking on was an alias to a file on another drive. This would be readily apparent because aliased files use an italic font to differentiate them from regular files.

You need to get Norton Utilities installed on that machine and scan the hard drive.
 
As I already told you, you have a SCSI ID conflict. This is why nothing works with the internal drive plugged in, it is conflicting with one of the external drives. You need to stop plugging in everything all at once when you don't know what the SCSI ID of the devices are.

And for the other error "application program that created it could not be found" is NOT because of missing drives, it is because of either file system corruption or whatever file you're trying to open not being associated with a program. The only way that error would happen with a missing drive is if whatever you were clicking on was an alias to a file on another drive. This would be readily apparent because aliased files use an italic font to differentiate them from regular files.

You need to get Norton Utilities installed on that machine and scan the hard drive.
But the external drives have to be connected for me to get anything besides a grey screen with a cursor in the corner.
I have verified 100% that there is no conflict of IDs. I just wish I could isolate the quantum drive by itself in the same fashion I could do if it was IDE and ext or fat formatted. I'm completely new to MacOS here, all versions, so the fact that I can't just open a terminal is driving me nuts. (Why do you guys have such an affinity for these?) I'm intrigued because there has got to be a way to do all the same things I want to do, run ScanDisk, image the drive so I dont accidentally mess it up, etc.
That being said...
I had no idea Norton Utilities was available for Mac. I am totally going to check that out. Thank you.
 
But the external drives have to be connected for me to get anything besides a grey screen with a cursor in the corner.

Then there's either something wrong with the Quantum HD, or it's not configured correctly. If it's the only device on the bus, make sure it has termination enabled. You need something like a System 7.5 floppy to boot the machine with the Quantum drive to see if anything is on it.


Download that and use Winimage to write the "Disk Tools" to floppies and boot your Mac from them.

I just wish I could isolate the quantum drive by itself in the same fashion I could do if it was IDE and ext or fat formatted.

SCSI is not IDE, if you treat it as such, you're going to have a bad time. SCSI is a parallel drop bus and SCSI devices are a lot smarter than IDE. There is no EXT or FAT in MacOS, unless you use PC Exchange to be able to read PC floppies. You have MFS, HFS and HFS+ primarily in 680x0/PPC Macintoshes. There is A/UX and Linux for later PowerPC machines, but we're not going into that here.

I'm completely new to MacOS here, all versions, so the fact that I can't just open a terminal is driving me nuts. (Why do you guys have such an affinity for these?) I'm intrigued because there has got to be a way to do all the same things I want to do, run ScanDisk, image the drive so I dont accidentally mess it up, etc.

Mac OS was designed from the beginning to be an entirely GUI driven OS, there is no command line, nor is there the need for one. The only CLI stuff you'll use is Macsbug if you have it installed, which is a debugger, and you don't need it unless you're doing software development.

Mac OS also does not have a built-in disk scanner, as I've been trying to tell you the past several posts. You need to use the Disk First Aid application, and Norton Utilities. If you want to look at disk partition information, you need to use a patched version of Apple HD SC Setup or Drive Setup.
 
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Linux to do what? You don't need Linux or Unix to do any of this stuff, Windows with the right programs works fine.
 
Always can try to find a member local who can image the drive for you... Or even mail it packed right. Sometimes thats the best answer. Then you could mount it in any of the many macintosh emulators easily. Just saying its an option... Anyone here in DC Area?
 
Did you get anywhere with this?

If the Quantum drive was the primary boot drive and also has the other needed files and programs, there may be a way to change to another drive to boot.

On a multi-drive Mac, one drive is selected by the user as the boot drive. That's done using the Startup Disk Control Panel (found under the Apple logo top left on the screen). Obviously at least one drive has to have a System Folder, but you could have one on all your drives if you wished. It appears that's the case with your Mac; there must be at least two drives with a System Folder on them. One on the Quantum that has "issues" and whichever other drive you've had some success with getting to the desktop.

We know this because when you power up a Mac, you'll get a happy mac icon if it finds a system folder. If there are none to be found, you'll get a folder with blinking ? question mark. You never reported the blinking ? screen.

When the chosen Startup Disk can't be found, the Mac will move on and boot the first System it comes across. Simply unplugging the Quantum allowed the Mac to boot because there was another drive that also has a System Folder. Reconnecting the Quantum, it goes back to wanting to boot from it, so you need to choose a different drive to boot from. That way you can have the Quantum connected but not getting in the way of a successful boot.

Here's a couple other ways to get there with all drives powered and connected.

From what you have reported, when all drives are connected and powered, it's apparently finding the chosen boot drive and trying to start but fails somewhere in the process. Try starting with the Shift key held down. That bypasses Extensions and might get you to a desktop to have a look around at which extension might be glitched. You'd probably have to be more familiar with Mac first to know where to look.

A better method to try is hold down the Option key when booting. Be patient. You should get a chance then to select a different drive to boot from instead of the Quantum. Available drives will show as their desktop names which could be anything the previous user gave them. Tom, Dick, Harry or Drive1, ExtDrive, Ext2. I don't recall if it shows SCSI ID at this stage or not. So pick one other than the first one to show.

Once you're at the desktop, you'll know the disk you're actually booted from as it'll be on the top right. Set it as your Startup Disk using the control panel and you're golden.

"Fixing" the Quantum might only need a couple corrupted files replaced. Or possibly reinstalling a new system into the existing System Folder. But before you do that, you'll need to make sure you keep any specialized files, extensions and control panels related to all of the installed upgrades. This is not the place to just jump in blind and make a bunch of changes. Someone more familiar with Macs could help. I'd have to parse through any and all the systems on those drives to find out what all is needed for which upgrade.

Same goes for any of the other drives you choose as your new boot drive will also have to have these "extra" bits in its System Folder to enable use of the upgrades.

There. Easy Peasy, right? Well, choosing a different boot drive is pretty straight up, dinking around with a bunch of upgrades and software to operate, not so much.
 
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