DaMadFiddler
Member
Hi, everyone. I'm new.
This board was recommended to me by someone on another forum, and I'm just looking for some help getting started.
I recently came into possession of two Mac SE/30s, each of which has a slightly different set of problems.
One has a 160MB hard drive and four 1MB SIMMS. It has no sound, and starts to boot (happy Mac icon) but never gets to the "Welcome to Macintosh" screen. If I disconnect the hard drive, I get the question-mark disk icon, so I think the data on the hard drive may just be corrupt; I'll know once I have a chance to make a boot disk at work. (All I have at home besides the SE/30s is a MacBook Pro). Still no sound, though. Also, the battery appears to be dead.
The second has a 40MB hard drive and eight 1MB SIMMS. It boots from the hard drive just fine, and appears to have System 7.5 installed. It has sound. However, every sixth or so column of pixels is black, and the column next to each black column flickers in and out of activity. The result is a vertical pinstripe effect, which makes the computer very difficult to use. I tried swapping the logic boards in the two systems to see if the video issue was perhaps a problem with the analog board. Even connected to the new analog board & CRT, the lines showed up... so it must be a problem with the logic board. I also tried re-seating the SIMMS as I saw in a search that RAM issues can cause odd screen and system behavior. No dice.
Each system is more or less stock (except for the 160MB hard drive in the one unit), with no PDS cards or other modifications that might introduce a problem. So, based on what I've read, it seems like both the lack of sound on the first system and the video problems on the second system may be the result of faulty capacitors on the respective logic boards.
I'm not very good at small, precision soldering; I learned that last year, when I had to wire up a couple of control knobs to a USB controller as part of a jukebox I was building. (I took a gutted antique radio console that I'd found in the trash and refinished, mounted an LCD where the dial used to be, replaced the knobs with the aforementioned digital controls, added some nice speaker cones and an amplifier, and used an unmodified Mac Mini G4 set to boot into Front Row as the heart of the whole thing). All I had to do was desolder a pot from the PCB, and resolder it at the end of some lead wires... it took me a couple of weeks and numerous failed tries just to get the bloody thing soldered up well enough to hold. This is why I stick to antique radios when it comes to electronics repair. Everything's big and isolated, there's no need for detail work, and there was no such thing as a PCB; it was all just wires and sockets.
I've tried doing some searching on the forums, but I'd really appreciate it if there were either a step-by-step guide somewhere, or a list of businesses that can do this sort of work (and what they'd charge for it). I have some experience maintaining vintage electronics; I buy, fix, and sell pre-WWII radio consoles as a hobby. However, working with wires and large components in a spacious chassis with an exceedingly simple (by today's standards) design is very different from dealing with much more minute components on a PCB.
I have a feeling this may already exist somewhere on the forum, but I was having trouble finding what I needed in the search results and I'd really like to get both of these guys back up to full speed. I'd eventually like to pimp them out a bit (more RAM, bigger hard drives, and maybe a few add-ons if I can actually find any PDS cards at a decent price), but of course I need to get the base machines in proper working order before I can even start thinking about that.
Any advice is more than welcome. Vintage computers are sort of a new realm for me; when a component breaks in a computer, my response up 'til now has been to replace the component. However, I'd imagine this would be a bit less practical with an SE/30 logic board. This is new ground for me, and I'd like to get both of these machines operating like new again. Please help!
This board was recommended to me by someone on another forum, and I'm just looking for some help getting started.
I recently came into possession of two Mac SE/30s, each of which has a slightly different set of problems.
One has a 160MB hard drive and four 1MB SIMMS. It has no sound, and starts to boot (happy Mac icon) but never gets to the "Welcome to Macintosh" screen. If I disconnect the hard drive, I get the question-mark disk icon, so I think the data on the hard drive may just be corrupt; I'll know once I have a chance to make a boot disk at work. (All I have at home besides the SE/30s is a MacBook Pro). Still no sound, though. Also, the battery appears to be dead.
The second has a 40MB hard drive and eight 1MB SIMMS. It boots from the hard drive just fine, and appears to have System 7.5 installed. It has sound. However, every sixth or so column of pixels is black, and the column next to each black column flickers in and out of activity. The result is a vertical pinstripe effect, which makes the computer very difficult to use. I tried swapping the logic boards in the two systems to see if the video issue was perhaps a problem with the analog board. Even connected to the new analog board & CRT, the lines showed up... so it must be a problem with the logic board. I also tried re-seating the SIMMS as I saw in a search that RAM issues can cause odd screen and system behavior. No dice.
Each system is more or less stock (except for the 160MB hard drive in the one unit), with no PDS cards or other modifications that might introduce a problem. So, based on what I've read, it seems like both the lack of sound on the first system and the video problems on the second system may be the result of faulty capacitors on the respective logic boards.
I'm not very good at small, precision soldering; I learned that last year, when I had to wire up a couple of control knobs to a USB controller as part of a jukebox I was building. (I took a gutted antique radio console that I'd found in the trash and refinished, mounted an LCD where the dial used to be, replaced the knobs with the aforementioned digital controls, added some nice speaker cones and an amplifier, and used an unmodified Mac Mini G4 set to boot into Front Row as the heart of the whole thing). All I had to do was desolder a pot from the PCB, and resolder it at the end of some lead wires... it took me a couple of weeks and numerous failed tries just to get the bloody thing soldered up well enough to hold. This is why I stick to antique radios when it comes to electronics repair. Everything's big and isolated, there's no need for detail work, and there was no such thing as a PCB; it was all just wires and sockets.
I've tried doing some searching on the forums, but I'd really appreciate it if there were either a step-by-step guide somewhere, or a list of businesses that can do this sort of work (and what they'd charge for it). I have some experience maintaining vintage electronics; I buy, fix, and sell pre-WWII radio consoles as a hobby. However, working with wires and large components in a spacious chassis with an exceedingly simple (by today's standards) design is very different from dealing with much more minute components on a PCB.
I have a feeling this may already exist somewhere on the forum, but I was having trouble finding what I needed in the search results and I'd really like to get both of these guys back up to full speed. I'd eventually like to pimp them out a bit (more RAM, bigger hard drives, and maybe a few add-ons if I can actually find any PDS cards at a decent price), but of course I need to get the base machines in proper working order before I can even start thinking about that.
Any advice is more than welcome. Vintage computers are sort of a new realm for me; when a component breaks in a computer, my response up 'til now has been to replace the component. However, I'd imagine this would be a bit less practical with an SE/30 logic board. This is new ground for me, and I'd like to get both of these machines operating like new again. Please help!