wilson@walt.cc.utexas.edu (Samuel M. Wilson) (10/04/90)
My hard disk on a Mac SE (FDHD) with internal 20Mb has been been going from bad to worse for the last few weeks. Here are the symptoms. For a while it would report disk errors and offer to correct them; occasionally it would fail to reload the finder and hang; eventually if I powered it down it would fail to boot, showing the "?" screen. If I booted from a diskette it would sometimes mount the fixed disk, and sometimes be unable to find it. Finally, it couldn't find a SCSI device at all. I took it to the repair people, who said the disk was bad and they would give me a reconditioned 20 meg for ca500$, to which I said no thanks. I thought perhaps there was just a loose cable somewhere, and went in and jiggled everything. Voila, it worked again. I reformatted several times and reloaded everything. Now it is refusing to find the disk again. The drive light lazily flashes away, but the computer denies any knowledge that there is a fixed disk in there. What's wrong? If I leave the dead disk alone and buy an external SCSI disk, will it work, or is there something wrong with the SCSI addressing hardware. Thanks, Sam Wilson (please respond to wilson@ix1.cc.utexas.edu)