I have been slowly getting back into my vintage Macs. When I tried to fire up my SE, the Hard drive was dead, as was the floppy drive. So I replaced both, though I don't know if the floppy drive was any good. I managed to get a System onto the "new" hard drive via a SyQuest drive, but the floppy still didn't work.
So I sent the motherboard out to have some work done to it, after being told the borne (sp?) filter may be bad, with no effect. I bought an 800k external drive which works fine with this machine. I recently traded for a third internal floppy drive, figuring that the first two were bad (the second one made some pretty rough noises when first installed; I sprayed it down and cleaned it up with some contact cleaner...). When I installed this third one, it didn't work either. I then swapped out the motherboard with an SE/30 motherboard I had laying around, and it didn't work with it either. (I honestly don't recall if I tried the 800k drive with the SE/30 though)
One thing I did notice with the SE board (and maybe the SE/30?) was that if I put in an 800k disk the dialog box would give the option of formatting single sided, and if it were a HD disk, it wouldn't. So I think I've got the right ROMs. I don't remember ever swapping them or the board out of this machine, but last time I used it was likely ten years ago.
So assuming I have a good floppy drive (I trust it was good when it left the person I got it from), is there anything else I could be looking for? I've never heard of a ribbon cable going bad, but I guess it could be possible. Do the HD drives take more juice than an 800k drive and my power supply isn't giving it what it needs?
That's all I can think of at the moment. If anyone has any other ideas, I would really like to hear them.
J White
So I sent the motherboard out to have some work done to it, after being told the borne (sp?) filter may be bad, with no effect. I bought an 800k external drive which works fine with this machine. I recently traded for a third internal floppy drive, figuring that the first two were bad (the second one made some pretty rough noises when first installed; I sprayed it down and cleaned it up with some contact cleaner...). When I installed this third one, it didn't work either. I then swapped out the motherboard with an SE/30 motherboard I had laying around, and it didn't work with it either. (I honestly don't recall if I tried the 800k drive with the SE/30 though)
One thing I did notice with the SE board (and maybe the SE/30?) was that if I put in an 800k disk the dialog box would give the option of formatting single sided, and if it were a HD disk, it wouldn't. So I think I've got the right ROMs. I don't remember ever swapping them or the board out of this machine, but last time I used it was likely ten years ago.
So assuming I have a good floppy drive (I trust it was good when it left the person I got it from), is there anything else I could be looking for? I've never heard of a ribbon cable going bad, but I guess it could be possible. Do the HD drives take more juice than an 800k drive and my power supply isn't giving it what it needs?
That's all I can think of at the moment. If anyone has any other ideas, I would really like to hear them.
J White