Mac SE/30 Grey Screen Logic Board Problem

[davidg5678]

Hello,

I am trying to repair an SE/30 logic board with a strange issue. Before I started repairing it, there was very minimal corrosion on the board, and I have thoroughly cleaned it all off. The logic board was then recapped with brand new tantalum capacitors.

When I try to turn the computer on, I get a normal SE/30 boot chime shortly followed by an error chime. The screen remains a crisp grey, and there are no artifacts present. No matter how long I wait, the computer never shows a floppy disk icon -it just stays on the gray screen. I am testing the board in a known good chassis from another recently restored Mac SE.

Please let me know if you have any ideas about this problem. Thanks!

Attached is a video of the problem.



View attachment SE30_Logic_Board_Problem.mov

 

[beachycove]

The SE/30 in my experience can be very picky about RAM, and bad/ poorly seated/ incorrectly configured RAM can give you death chimes.

 

[davidg5678]

The SE/30 in my experience can be very picky about RAM, and bad/ poorly seated/ incorrectly configured RAM can give you death chimes. 

Thanks for the advice! I just removed one of the banks of RAM I had installed on the motherboard and the error chime went away. I replaced the RAM with some spare SIMMS I had lying around, and now the computer boots up perfectly! I'm glad that this issue was so simple and did not require me to patch a bunch of broken traces.