Mac SE/30 boots after years in my attic.

[wildstar1063]

Well, I finally got my Mac SE/30 to boot after I took it down from my attic. it had been up there for at least 12 years. When I took it down, I pulled the battery which fortunately had not exploded over the logic board. Since taking it down, I have recapped the logic board and the analog board and now it will boot, but I've only been able to get it to boot from the ROM image included on one of those Purple ROM's.

The first thing I found after getting it back together was that the old Quantum hard drive has that issue where the heads sticks to that gooey thing underneath the platters, and that the floppy drive had been setting for so long it was nearly glued together from the hardening of the old lube. So I've got it back apart again and have cleaned and lubed the floppy and replaced that little gear with one purchased from a seller on eBay. I am currently waiting for this item-




To arrive from eBay, to see if it will fix the issue with the old Quantum Drive. I worked at Seagate building hard drives, in the clean rooms, here in Oklahoma City from 1989 up until 2000, so I wouldn't be afraid to take the thing apart and replace the bumper if I had to, but I thought this would be worth a try.

I've got several versions of Mac OS and a bunch of old disc tools on 3 1/2 inch floppy that I used on my.A-Max Mac emulator on my old Amiga 3000 back in the 90's, if the disks are still good, so hopefully, I will have some tools to work with.

I am diabetic and have problems with my eyes due to that, so in order to recap the logic board, I bought one of those little cheap microscope cameras with built-in 10 inch screen from an eBay seller, which helped immensely with the soldering. It took a bit to get used to it, though, and I think I managed to touch the edge of most of the connectors with my soldering iron ;-) due to the field of vision of the microscope, being too small and not paying attention to where the rest of the soldering iron was. But everything still works.

Once I get everything back together again, I'll post some pictures of it working.

Chuck E.

 

[falen5]

I have opened a good few scsi drives from Macs that refused to work and got them going again.

For some it was just a case of 'flicking' the unopened drive in my hand - a small rotational 'jolt' would be enough to get the swing arm moving

Others it was the liquified rubber bushes between the magnets that I had to replace

On some that were just sticky I just cut a small strip of masking tape to wrap around the entire rubber bush - it worked

I did this on my bench - no clean room

Of course they are just temporary fix's - I only tried so i could see if there was any software I wanted to save onto my main external

but the majority of drives that would not work I got going again

 

[wildstar1063]

I have opened a good few scsi drives from Macs that refused to work and got them going again.

For some it was just a case of 'flicking' the unopened drive in my hand - a small rotational 'jolt' would be enough to get the swing arm moving

Others it was the liquified rubber bushes between the magnets that I had to replace

On some that were just sticky I just cut a small strip of masking tape to wrap around the entire rubber bush - it worked

I did this on my bench - no clean room

Of course they are just temporary fix's - I only tried so i could see if there was any software I wanted to save onto my main external

but the majority of drives that would not work I got going again

Yeah, I've done the flick of the wrist thing to get drives going that had bad field coils, I had an old Seagate ST1480N that came from my Amiga 3000, and it stopped booting, it wasn't anything stuck one of the field coils had gone bad and it simply wouldn't spin up, I could move the platters slightly through one of the holes covered by a warranty sticker, and it would start up, but wouldn't stay running because of the bad field coil it couldn't reach proper rotational speed and would just spin down, so I kept flicking it to keep the speed up and it finally stabilized and I was able to recover that drive. I still have it to this day, and sometimes I can still keep the speed up long enough to get it started, though I have moved all of its data to another SCSI drive.

One of the technicians out on the floor when I worked at Seagate actually had an old 5 1/4 drive with a bad field coil and he had put a pulley on the motor where it came out the bottom of the drive, and he would wrap a string around it and pull start that drive. It was pretty funny. I told him he should find the pull starter from a two-stroke weedeater and put on it. It would be hilarious. He said he was just trying to see how long he could keep it running.

I don't know about the Quantum drives, but the Seagate OKC designed drives had an internal filter, if you could keep the platter spinning long enough, without a head crash, most of the dust would simply get thrown into that filter. The issue with dust, is that hard drive heads do not touch the platter when the drive is running at speed, they are like little airfoils and fly micrometers above the surface of the disk so if a dust particle is on the platter and hits the head, in the wrong way, it will cause it to slam down into the surface, causing a head crash. The lubrication applied to the disk platters is basically for when the drive is spinning up and spinning down and the heads land on or taking off from the platter.

Chuck E.

 

[wildstar1063]

Well, here is my SE/30, booting from the old quantum 40meg hard drive.
I think there is still some issue with the floppy drive, though, I can't seem to get
it to read any of my old system discs. That could simply be because those discs
have been sitting around here since the mid 90s though, I'm going to have to find
some thing I can format and see how it does. If you run the video and see the little black
things near the right edge of the screen, that's just my cat.
The old drive is running system 7.1, and I installed 64 megs of ram in the system along
with the 32 bit clean rom. I guess I should have brought up the about this Mac, but didn't
think about it.
Now I just need to see how to get the network card to work with my home network.
There are copies of really really old versions of Netscape and Mosaic on this drive
that would be fun to try to play with.

View attachment SE-30.mp4

 

[Fred1212]

Nice one

 

[ymk]

Good work. Did the insert installation go well?

 

[wildstar1063]

Good work. Did the insert installation go well?

The insert went ok, but I had to modify it on the narrow end
with a dremel, it simply would not slot in to place. But after installing it,
it does seem to work. I'm wondering if the softer more rubber like TPU
print material might be better for this application, I believe TPU would
be a bit more expensive though.

Chuck E.