[RndTbl] sad Mac

[Peter O'Gorman]

Dan Martin wrote:
> I have a Mac plus and a number of accessories for it, including a  
> printer and 2 external hard drives.
> 
> The Mac video display will usually not come on, though sometimes it  
> will if left to run for a few minutes - I understand this is a common  
> and easily fixed problem for those who knew the Mac, but I really  
> don't have the room or use for it any more.

Must be 20 years or more ago since I repaired one, but I think there are
a couple of capacitors on the video board that are the first things to
go on a Mac plus.

> 
> I do have some sensitive information on the external drives.  Is there  
> a reliable way to guarantee the info is erased without destroying the  
> drives?

Secure erase overwrites the drives multiple times to ensure that none of
the  original information is retrievable.

> 
> The ideal solution for me, if such a thing exists, would be to run an  
> emulator in a modern machine (Mac, PC or Linux running on Intel), that  
> would be able to access the old drives through hardware that connects  
> the old attachments to USB.  Emulators may be available, but I don't  
> know about the hardware.

The drives would be SCSI-1 (5MB/s), there are cables/adaptors that would
do it, but I do not have one anymore, ebay is probably your best bet to
find one. Do you want to copy the data off the drives before the secure
erase? Do you happen to know if they are formatted MFS, or HFS? I don't
know if there are MFS drivers for linux, but one exists for Mac OS X
(readonly, Apple sample code)
http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/MFSLives/index.html. Perhaps
someone on the list can lend you a cable, if not, I have an older
powermac g3 that has a scsi interface (but I do not have any scsi
cables) that you could borrow to do the copy and erase.

Peter
-- 
Peter O'Gorman
http://pogma.com