• Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.

Macintosh SE out of storage worked great for two days and now it won't start

fionaellie

New member
It has a hard drive installed (I installed it in the late 80's) along with two floppies that it came with. Amazingly, it started up immediately and we played a few rounds of Tetris and Pipe Dream. Shut it down and the next morning it displays the floppy-disk-flashing-question-mark icon. It still boots off a floppy system disk, but the hard disk is not appearing on the desktop. The hard drive is definitely spinning up (I opened up the mac and confirmed it by listening and unplugging the power from the hard drive and hearing it spin down). I've checked the data cable and it looks ok. Any ideas? Thanks!
 

Nixontheknight

Well-known member
Unfortunately, the hard drive might have died while it was in storage, this happens frequently with old SCSI hard drives
 

fionaellie

New member
Unfortunately, the hard drive might have died while it was in storage, this happens frequently with old SCSI hard drives
I thought that might have happened, but it worked great for two days, and it still spins fine. That's why I'm wondering if it's something else -- I wonder if there's a way to test some aspect of it. I don't think the computer is recognizing the drive's presence.
 

Nixontheknight

Well-known member
I thought that might have happened, but it worked great for two days, and it still spins fine. That's why I'm wondering if it's something else -- I wonder if there's a way to test some aspect of it. I don't think the computer is recognizing the drive's presence.
if you have system disks, see if one has apple HD SC setup, you should be able to test it from there
 

joshc

Well-known member
Is the SCSI cable still plugged firmly into the logicboard? They have a tendency of popping out sometimes.
 

volvo242gt

Well-known member
I've had similar problems before. Not on an SE, but on a couple Centris 650 machines.

On one machine, it happened twice. Boot blocks got scrambled after a hard freeze in System 7.5.5. First time, nuked, repaved, and reinstalled from a backup I'd done three years prior. Second time, took the drive out, and put it into a IIci, which happily booted the drive. Reinstalled it in the 650 and that computer happily booted the drive as well.

On the other machine (the one I just retired), I added an activity LED to the drive. Powered up the Mac, heard a quiet *skkkrk* noise, then the platters spinning, but with no activity and the floppy disk icon in the middle of the screen flashing away. Replaced the drive with a 250MB drive, and kept the old 230MB drive as a backburner project. A couple months ago, bought a junker 230MB drive with an Apple ROM board on it. Swapped the board over out of curiousity. Connected the drive to my soon-to-be old LCIII.
IMG_8826.JPG
Worked. All the data is there, drive works fine.

If the SE froze up, and you have another Mac old enough to boot from the software that is on the drive, might be worth trying the trick I mentioned at the end of the second paragraph above. It might come back.
 
Top