Hard Drive Installation and Setup on a Quadra 700

Installing a new hard drive on a Quadra 700 is a fairly easy task. The side cover (or top, depends on your Mac orientation preference) is attached by a slotted end towards the front face and then released by pulling up two tabs at the rear.

There are two flexible rubber feet that can be pulled away, allowing the cover to be removed.

Once opened, the hard drive can be easily located on the side next to the power supply. All of the components (including the power supply) can be removed as separate modular systems.

The hard drive is removed by squeezing both sides of the two metal tabs of the hard drive caddy. Removing the ribbon and power cable to finalize the release. 

The hard drive replacement is a Maxtor 7345SR 345MB 50-Pin 3.5" SCSI Hard Drive. However, not all SCSI connections are the same. This unit requires a 50 pin double row SCSI connection with the larger 4 pin molex power connector.

The hard drive is attached to the caddy by four screws. Remove them to attach the new drive and then reinstall the caddy back into it's place and connect the cables.

This is an easy install, however... it was not quite so easy getting the Macintosh Quadra to recognize the hard drive!

A Macintosh computer has a special utility called Apple HD SC Setup. This utility can be found in the Tools Disk. Running this utility should "find" the hard drive and set it up, However... not in this case. 

This problem had to be solved with a third party utility by FBW Hard Disk Toolkit.

FWB Hard Disk Toolkit PE v1.6 can be found at http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/fwb-hard-disk-toolkit-v16-v163-update . This will make a bootable disk with the hard drive utility called RAID Toolkit. Booting this diskette, will bring up a menu with the following information. The installed Maxtor hard drive can now be seen. 

To make the Quadra "see" this hard drive, it needs to be mounted. The tab is located on the far right of the RAID Toolkit GUI. After mounting, I made the choice to partition the drive as two equal parts.

Everything seems to be solved, BUT... the oddities still continue. Installing the Mac system 7.1 disks will not boot the Quadra. The Computer has to be booted with the Disk Tools diskete and then the System Finder has to be copied to the new hard drive. 

The Quadra is rebooted (Disk Tools disk removed) and then the installation disks are installed.

Everything seems fine, but a run of the Apple HD SC Setup, still shows that the Mac Quadra does not have an attached SCSI device!

Using Modern Monitors with a Quadra 700

In order to create a complete vintage Quadra 700 system, an Apple Multiple Scan 15 Display manufactured in 1994 is chosen.

However, it seems rather blurry.

I'm sure the focus can be adjusted, but since I plan to use this system occasionally, I'd like to use a VGA LCD monitor.

 The typical VGA plug is a 15 pin 3 row D-connector.

The Apple Macintosh video uses a 15 pin two row D-connector. 

So simply plugging in the device will not work. For this to work, an adapter has to be used. These are available on sites such as eBay for a reasonable cost.

Generally called a HD15 VGA Monitor Female to DB15 MAC Male Converter Adapter. It should also have a series of DIP switches so it can be set to the type of monitor you are using.

The device can be set to a variety of monitors, including NTSC and PAL formats. A DIP switch chart needs to be available in order to know the proper settings and may come as a hard copy or web resource.

My monitor of choice for vintage systems is a NEC MultiSync 1560V+ manufactured in 1999. It seems to work best for my needs. It has a very sharp image with this system.

Out of curiosity, I tested a 15" Dell E153FPf LCD Monitor. Manufactured in 2005. It dosen't seem to like the setup and it displays a low contrast green image.

I also tested a 21" widescreen Vizio va22l fhdtv10t. It's a great all round monitor for vintage equipment due to it's TV tuner, composite, component, S-Video and VGA connections. It was manufactured sometime around 2008.

It has a beautiful sharp image as well, albeit an elongated horizontal distortion due to the widescreen format.

Macintosh Quadra 700

The Macintosh Quadra series was introduced on October 1991. It was one of the most powerful desktop computers available at the time. It was the first Macintosh model to utilize the Motorola 68040 processor and at 25MHZ, made it powerful enough for scientific work and the most demanding graphic and CAD applications. It also was the first model to ship with the new Macintosh System 7 OS.

This model has become a desirable collectors model. It's form-factor ( along with its compact size and computing power ) is it's major attraction. I've found two on eBay that I purchased reasonably. One is heavily beat up, will not boot a startup disk and the screen image is heavily distorted.

 

The second one can be cleaned up nicely, but the hard drive causes a strange startup and reboots twice. I would like to replace it.

I'm hoping to salvage parts from the damaged unit and make the appropriate repairs.

Here are the Quadra 700 specifications:

Processor

CPU: Motorola MC68040

CPU Speed: 25 MHz

FPU: integrated

Bus Speed: 25 MHz

Register Width: 32-bit

Data Bus Width: 32-bit

Address Bus Width: 32-bit

Level 1 Cache: 4 kB data, 4 kB instruction

ROM: 1 MB

RAM Type: 30 pin SIMM

Minimum RAM Speed: 80 ns

Onboard RAM: 4 MB

RAM slots: 4

Maximum RAM: 68 MB

Expansion Slots: 2 NuBus, 1 PDS

Video

VRAM: 512 kB - 2 MB (six sockets)

Max Resolution: 1152x870

Video Out: DB-15

Storage

Hard Drive: 80-400 MB

Floppy Drive: 1.4 MB SuperDrive

Input/Output

ADB: 2

Serial: 2 Mini DIN-8

SCSI: DB-25

Audio Out: stereo 8 bit mini

Audio In: mono 8 bit mini

Speaker: mono

Networking

Ethernet: AAUI-15

Miscellaneous

Power: 50 Watts

Dimensions: 5.5" H x 11.9" W x 14.4" D

Weight: 13.6 lbs.

In Jan 1992, an ad in MacWorld has the unit selling for 4995 USD. That's $8,574.92 in today's dollars!