Infamous Question Mark Battles Disk Tools....

Have you actually run Disk First Aid to check what it can see? If the hard disk is at all usable it should be able to see it, though you may have to reformat it. It seems likely the hard disk was what was giving you problems originally and may still be faulty.

actually got it to boot to the 7.0.1 disk tools disk. But now, that disk tools icon the only thing that will come up, regardless of what I do. I can open it with no problem. And I know to drag the system suitcase into the system folder of my hard disk, but I have no hard disk icon. No trash icon. Zero.

When starting from the 7.0.1 Disk Tools floppy, you should see its own icon and the Trash. Normally, the hard disk icon is between those two icons. If not, it means that the computer is unable to detect the presence of the hard disk. It is possible that the hard drive is faulty. Another possibility would be a defect in the circuits on one of the boards. It could also be something with the hard disk drive driver software or possibly the PRAM.

Since you apparently do not have backup copies, there is always a risk that anything that you do could lead to a situation where all information is permanently lost, so proceed at your own risk. One thing to remember (since you wish to retrieve documents): do NOT choose to initialise/reformat if such an option appears.

To begin with, it may be a good idea to reset the Power Manager and the PRAM. Any sign of the hard disk icon after that? Do you hear the sound of a spinning hard disk?

Next, you could launch Apple HD SC Setup on the Disk Tools floppy. Please be careful, since this utility could initialise/reformat a hard disk (which is not what you want). Check whether the program is able to detect the SCSI hard drive at all. If yes, you may want to use Apple HD SC Setup to try to update the driver (ideally, one should run Disk First Aid before this, but that may not be possible).

It may also become necessary to use another disk utility (e.g., Mt. Everything), or to open the computer in order to examine cables, connectors, solder joints, capacitors et cetera.

Jan

Hi, with hard drives that are this old many have a tendency to stick. Called stiction by some of us oldtimer techs.

I pulled this from Wikipedia. (below) One thing we used to try is gently swish (not violently shake) a suspect hard drive from side to side to see it that freed it up enough to spin up. One thing to keep in mind is that the hard drive will NOT be reliable.

Kevin

Hard disk drives
In the context of hard disk drives, stiction refers to the tendency of read/write heads to stick to the platters. Stiction is a complex and not very well understood phenomenon of hard disks. Stiction most likely occurs as a result of 2 properties of the platters, smoothness and magnetic forces. Once the heads have stuck to the platters, the disk will be prevented from spinning up and can cause physical damage to the media. Other forces considered as responsible for stiction include electrostatic forces and adhesion from the inherent stickiness of silicon.[citation needed]
In the early models of hard disk drives stiction was known to cause read/write heads to stick the platters of the hard drive due to the breakdown of lubricants used to coat the platters. During the late 1980s and early 1990s as the size of hard drive platters decreased from the older 8" and 5.25" sizes to 3.5" and smaller, manufacturers continued to use the same calendering processes and lubricants used on the older, larger drives. The much tighter space caused much higher internal operating temperatures in these newer smaller drives, often leading to an accelerated breakdown of the surface lubricants into their much stickier components. When the drive was powered off and would cool down(say at the end of the day when a user went home and shut off their PC), these now-broken-down lubricants would become quite viscous and sticky, sometimes causing the read/write heads to literally stick to the platter. The common solution to this problem was the counter-intuitive move of taking the affected drive out of the host system, striking it gently, but firmly on the side against a desk or something as laterally as possible and then re-install it in the host system. This would break the heads free of the goop long enough to power the system back on, have the drive spin up and recover whatever data could be retrieved off it. While the data was retrieved, the machine would be left on constantly so that the heat from the drive's internals would keep the decaying lubricants in a liquid state.

Hi,

Since all I have is PC available, can I use something like your step by step guide you detailed back in 04/13/06 for creating a bootable floppy thru PC?

You could use said description in order to get a bootable Network Access Disk 7.5 (in addition to the 7.0.1 Disk Tools that you have created already), which might be a good idea anyway. However, in order to modify the Network Access floppy to hold Mt. Everything, a Mac with a (built-in) floppy drive would be needed.

Also, the Mt. Everything download is in the form of a StuffIt (.sit) file. Normally, one shall not unpack such a file on a PC (wait until on a Mac, and decompress via StuffIt Expander there). Otherwise, the special two-part structure (one resource and one data fork) of a Mac program file will be damaged. The creation of floppies directly from certain (Disk Copy 4.2 type) disk images on a PC is an exception.

If not, I can eventually get a newer Apple from a friend that has web access, download the MT E and generate an Apple CD, then fgure out a way to get that to floppy.

A Mac is not needed for the download as such; you could use your PC (and then a 1.44 MB diskette for a pure transfer, as long as you keep the .sit file unaltered until on a Mac, as mentioned earlier). Many older Macs can read PC floppies (providing that a PC Exchange control panel is present and active, or that a separate Apple File Exchange program is used). If necessary, a utility such as HFVExplorer or TransMac can be used on a PC to allow the handling of Mac-formatted 1.44 MB floppy disks.

Most helpful in this case would be another Mac introduced approx. 1991 to 1996, running something like System 7.0.1 to 7.6.1. Then you could use that Mac for floppy modifications and for various tests.

You may need a suitable version of StuffIt Expander for Macintosh. This is how to obtain a working 4.0.1 installer through a PC: Download the MACDISK.EXE file here. Prepare an empty PC-formatted 1.44 MB diskette via FORMAT A: in DOS or the "full" formatting option under Windows. Run the MACDISK.EXE program on the PC. Follow the on-screen instructions. When ready, immediately move the (now Mac-formatted) floppy to an old Mac and carry out the StuffIt Expander installation.

Jan

Addendum

A plain Network Access boot floppy can be very useful. If you would connect the Printer Port of the PowerBook 140 to the corresponding port of another old Mac via a standard MiniDIN-8M to MiniDIN-8M Mac serial printer cable, you could access the second Mac's hard disk (and utilities and other programs residing there) via file sharing.

Jan