I just joined the SE/30 reloaded build club, so I thought I would share a couple of my experiences. I received my board from
@ThisDoesNotCompute (thanks Colin!) but it wasn't one of the boards he got made up with the wrong components under the RAM slots. It's a Rev 03 board, so it required the little bodge wire to get rid of the graphic artefacts.
At first testing I was getting a sad Mac chime, but I was getting audio and video (simasimac pattern) so I was pretty sure the fix would be straightforward. After lots of testing, I was getting all sorts of intermittent issues. Sometimes it would startup fine, other times it would give a sad Mac chime, other times it would be silent.
Fast forward many hours and I finally found the cause. It was a faulty RAM slot. I salvaged the RAM slots from an old SE/30 and even though I cleaned them, I guess there were some issues with the contacts, or maybe something was cracked. I removed the Bank A slots and replaced them with some newer slots I salvaged from a Mac IIsi, and all of a sudden it came good.
The other issue I had was an odd one, but I found the cause. The SE/30 would not boot from SCSI, but it
would boot from the floppy drive. However, when I booted via floppy (using a System 7.0.1 image with a Floppy Emu) the SCSI drive mounted and I could access it. So SCSI was working, it just wouldn't
boot from SCSI.
I was able to run Snooper, and the PRAM/RTC chip failed its test. I whipped it out and replaced it with another, and bingo! The SCSI booted perfectly. So if you ever have an SE/30 that won't boot from the SCSI drive, but the SCSI still passes all tests, check out the RTC chip, that might be the problem.
It's been a frustrating exercise, knowing that my assembly was fine, but my stooooooopid decision to use old, plastic RAM SIMMs gave me no end of trouble.
A huge thanks to
@Bolle for creating the SE/30 board in the first place, and for always replying to my annoying messages with support.
Another huge thanks has to go to
@WillJac for his help during my build livestreams.
And anyone with a keen eye will notice I soldered the PDS slot backwards. Check twice and solder once.