I bought a Macintosh SE at a car boot sale today for £20 and it works fine, except for the hard drive. The OS can't find it at all and the light on the front seems to be blinking out 'SOS' in Morse code. After researching on the Internet, I found out that it was a sign of hard drive failure. All this floppy disk swapping is starting to get on my nerves, so now I have a couple of questions.

1) Where would I get a Macintosh SE hard drive from these days? eBay doesn't seem to have any. (And how much are they likely to cost?)
2) What is the procedure for replacing the hard drive?

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It's a SCSI hard drive.

If it uses a SCSI drive, can I use any SCSI drive or does it have to be an original Macintosh SE drive? Also, is there a limit to what I can use if I can use non-original drives?

HFS has a theoretical maximum of 2GB however you can partition it 2GB segments to get around that problem. With SCSI and older Apple hardware, it is better to find a Apple SCSI hard drive. You can use non-Apple Drives but they generally require formatting by a FWG or Similar hard drive formatting programs to allow it to work.
Before going into that though, just plug it in, put in a system install disk, and see what happens. Sometimes you don't need to use FWG.

It is always hit and miss from my experience.

That's a strange one - my SE (not SE/30) did that - when I shoved the drive into my LC III the drive worked perfectly. Upon returning it to the SE the drive started working again.

I bet the drive needs low level formatting (I think using Apple HD SC setup)

The kind of drives that came with the SE originally are pretty rare to come across and are prone to dying due to age. I still have an SE with internal drive that shockingly still works. Loud as heck though and I'm thinking it won't last if I use it too much. 1gb scsi 50 pin drives can be had for $10-20 easy on ebay and is probably more space than you'd ever need on an SE.

Hi there! New user here. Long time Apple Tech.

You might want to try warming up the hard drive. It may be suffering from a fault called "stiction".

To explain, when the hard drive is un-powered the heads are in contact with the platters of the hard disk, when initially spinning up, the heads need to "slip" on the surface. To do this a thin film of lubricant is applied to the surface of the hard drive platters.

With age, the lubricant dries out and/or becomes displaced which defeats the purpose. When the drive is cold this can make it impossible for the drive servo motor to spin the disk due to insufficient torque to overcome the "stuck" head(s).

IIRC, the very early Quantum 20-40MB half height drives required a ROM upgrade to prevent an issue where the heads would move in a fashion that displaced the lubricant.

Heating the drive up a little may assist as can gently thumping the drive when power is initially applied (the first 10 seconds or so) to free the heads.

Good Luck!

Sure, these drives are not exactly common anymore, but the supply still far exceeds the demand. Especially on a 68k Mac where the programs are so small. Don't give the eBayers cause to think they can start overcharging for them. What you are looking for is basic 50-pin SCSI drives, somewhere between 50MB and 2GB. Honestly if you look around you can probably buy a whole box of these and mostly just pay shipping - they may not be rare, but they are still heavy.

There is a sort of firmware lock where Apple's utility will format an Apple-branded drive, but not others. Either use the hacked drive setup for A/UX or a 3rd party app such as Ledo.

Stiction can be a problem, so look for drives which don't appear to have come off of somebody's basement floor, or the squirrel nest in their garage. If it has been kept in decent conditions and seen use even every couple of years, it should move just fine. Or otherwise try warming it up for a little while.

I just bought a cheap SE this year, and I love it!

Hallo,

google for "gamba mac"; there you can find the Macintosh SE service manual, in case you need.

BR
Andrea

You will need a Torx driver, T-15, shaft about a foot long or so. There are two bolts in the handle, and two down near the PCB bracket at the bottom. Undo those four bolts and you can gently shake the two halves of the case apart, or use a thin plastic wedge to separate. This is whrn you want to be very careful of the CRT tube! You can easily either: 1. electrocute yourself, or 2. break the back of the tube off - neither would be good. Drives are mounted in the area where you can see the floppy slot(s) on the front. If there are two floppy drives you will need to either lose one, or get creative at fitting your drive in there. Otherwise you might find one floppy and one hard drive, which is easiest.

You will need to undo probably three cables. SCSI is a 50-pin ribbon cable, power is usual 4-pin Molex, and there might also be a small cable for LED status light on the front of the drive tray. To remove the drive tray there are two screws underneath the tray, about two inches (5cm) in. You might need to patient with all of this because the SE case is a tight fit. If you are not too hasty you can open the case and remove the drive tray without breaking anything, it took me a bit longer than I expected. Then you can just remove the screws on the side of the tray and install the new drive.

Note that the tray (mine, at least) has no mounting holes on the bottom, they are on the sides only. You are better off replacing the drive with a semi-recent one for several reasons. A 1-2 GB drive is probably going to last longer. Also the older drives often require some funky interleave when you format, which can really screw things up if you need to read the drive in another Mac (this is more an issue for an external HD, you don't want it corrupt if you connect to another Mac). Once 1GB drives were available they had built-in buffers and could use a "normal" Mac interleave. If your new drive has Apple firmware (it was from another Mac) then the built-in drive utilities should work. Otherwise there is a hacked version of the A/UX "Apple HD SC Setup" which should work, or otherwise score a floppy of Ledo or FWB tools, etc.

The DB25 SCSI port on the back, may be worth a try too.
Perhaps you could find an external HDD case or a Syquest SQ555?
I kept some of those, just for nostalgia.
A 68 pin device may work too internally, if you can manage to connect it with an adapter.
I did so with my MacII, but I have no idea, how much room is in a SE.
I am pretty sure I have a System6 disk with the patched HD SC Setup somewhere, if that would be
of any use for you. Did you try to "repair" the HDD with Norton or SUM already?