My New Quadra 800

[jmacz]

The Quadra 800 is finally finished. USPS / UPS Mail Innovations lost the Fujitsu 640MB MO Drive I bought on eBay (from China). Finally got a refund and then purchased a Fujitsu 2.3GB MO Drive (my second one) instead of a 640MB.

Finished modeling the Quadra 800 bezel for the MO drive. It could use some more work but I've got too many projects backed up so decided to just go with what I have for now and revisit it sometime in the future for a perfect fit.

The current model:





My resin printer isn't large enough to print it in one piece so had to split it into two pieces and join it together after printing. Here's post printing:





I also had to make a new mounting bracket for the drive. I needed to lift it about 1cm above the sliding mounting plate that comes with the Quadra 800 for that drive bay.



And here's the final shot with it installed. It's the last bezel with the blue MO disk sticking out.



Was debugging my first 2.3GB MO Drive with @olePigeon and it looks like that one has some issues. This second 2.3GB MO Drive is working great. CDROM drive is also working great.

 

[jmacz]

Oh, a shot of some of the prototype bezels (via 3d filament printing)..

 

[Daniël]

Delta WFB1212LE

• Pressure: 4.00mm H2O

Noctua NF-A12x25

• Pressure: 2.34mm H2O

Haven't seen it explicitly mentioned here, but static pressure is also very important for fans like these. It has to pull air through the entire system, so it deals with a lot of resistance. This makes static pressure incredibly important, and generally higher static pressure results in more noise. Quiet fans are nice, but they're designed with modern PC cases in mind, which generally put a lot of emphasis on airflow, making it easy to push a decent amount of air around with low static pressure. Which is not the same with these old PC and Mac cases, where generally a single fan located in the power supply had to pull air through restrictive spaces.

 

[jmacz]

Thanks @Daniël! Yeah, I left the stock fan in there for now.

 

[pl212]

My resin printer isn't large enough to print it in one piece so had to split it into two pieces and join it together after printing. Here's post printing:

View attachment 67616

Wow, that's a great result -- out of curiosity, how does a resin print replicate (if at all) the texture of the original plastic?

 

[jmacz]

It depends on the model. My model is smooth so the end result is also smooth. I am sure you could find a way to texturize it but I did not bother. You could also update the model to have the texture I guess.

 

[jmacz]

My Quadra 800 started acting up a couple days ago. Random lock ups during boot -- first Quicktime.. then after disabling that, locks up at another extension/control panel, then disable that, and so on.. can finally get it to finish booting. But re-enable those disabled extensions (which were all working before) and I have a problem. Then started getting random lockups during file copies to/from my internal ZuluSCSI and also to an internal MO drive.

Tried swapping out memory sticks, didn't help. Ended up running a MacTest Pro test on look and it found nothing.

Felt like disk corruption of some kind so I downloaded an MD5 checksum tool, created a large stuffit file, and then duplicated it on the same disk and ran checksums on each. Different. Ugh.

In terms of hardware, I swapped the MO drive and the CD-ROM drive recently, and also changed the video card. It was working without issue before that.

I've removed everything but the ZuluSCSI and re-installed a fresh System 7.5.5. Going to watch it and then slowly add the other SCSI devices back in one by one and see if one of them is causing my issue. Memory-wise, swapping sticks didn't help but there is 8MB of memory on the motherboard which could be faulty. Or the SCSI chip.

 

[jmacz]

Weird.. put the MO drive back in and re-installed System 7.5.5. Everything's good right now. Just finished copying all of CodeWarrior 4 Pro (800+ MB) to MO disk from a Zulu and it looks all good.

At this point the three changes from the last 2 weeks I left out:

• Internal CD-ROM drive
• NOW Utilities 6.0
• External Zip 100 Drive (one of two that I have)

Made a copy of the main drive so that I don't have to go through the process of re-installing everything again. Next up is to try putting the CD-ROM drive back in.

 

[jmacz]

Things are good with the CD-ROM drive in but looks like I might possibly have some type of short associated with the CD-ROM audio cable. If I connect the 4 pin audio connector from the CD-ROM drive to the logic board, then I start getting static on the speaker and every couple boots, the CD-ROM drive doesn't detect even though it's getting power. With the audio cable removed, things look fine. My previous CD-ROM drive had an issue with the laser (need to debug that at some point) so I replaced it with another. This second one reads/writes fine but looks like it may have a short of some kind with the audio out. Another thing to debug. Not sure if this is my complete issue but so far looking good with that cable unplugged. I still haven't re-installed NOW Utilities 6.0 yet or plugged my external Zip drive in.

 

[lobust]

Things are good with the CD-ROM drive in but looks like I might possibly have some type of short associated with the CD-ROM audio cable. If I connect the 4 pin audio connector from the CD-ROM drive to the logic board, then I start getting static on the speaker and every couple boots, the CD-ROM drive doesn't detect even though it's getting power. With the audio cable removed, things look fine. My previous CD-ROM drive had an issue with the laser (need to debug that at some point) so I replaced it with another. This second one reads/writes fine but looks like it may have a short of some kind with the audio out. Another thing to debug. Not sure if this is my complete issue but so far looking good with that cable unplugged. I still haven't re-installed NOW Utilities 6.0 yet or plugged my external Zip drive in.

Have you recapped the cd drive? It's really mandatory to do on these...

 

[jmacz]

Have you recapped the cd drive? It's really mandatory to do on these...

Yup did that when I first got the machine for the original and also recapped the second one I got.

 

[lobust]

Yup did that when I first got the machine for the original and also recapped the second one I got.

Does your drive also have the front panel (Volume/Headphone) board? I have caddy drives that have that board and others that don't, but there are caps on that board too and it's connected to the audio out circuitry of the drive...

 

[Callan]

Does your drive also have the front panel (Volume/Headphone) board? I have caddy drives that have that board and others that don't, but there are caps on that board too and it's connected to the audio out circuitry of the drive...

Super good advice! Every caddy cdrom I've seen with the front panel has had bad cap leakage! If it has damage I would leave the ffc unplugged. At least until your sure you have the cdrom @ 100%

 

[jmacz]

Does your drive also have the front panel (Volume/Headphone) board? I have caddy drives that have that board and others that don't, but there are caps on that board too and it's connected to the audio out circuitry of the drive...

You might be right... I don't remember if I replaced those on my first drive, but definitely not on the second drive. I will need to check if either drive has that board.

 

[jmacz]

My first drive didn't have that board (it doesn't have a front facing headphone jack or volume knob). The second drive however did have that tiny board on the front face, and you guys were right, three caps on there in horrible shape. Replaced all three and cleaned up the board, did some basic checks to see if the caps had done any damage but doesn't look like it.

The weird corruption thing isn't happening right now, but I still have a noisy speaker with the cable plugged. I tested with an audio CD and it does play through the speaker. But I get a pop as soon as audio starts/stops, and I also am getting a lot of noise -- for example, whenever there's IO on the SCSI bus, I can hear the IO access through the speaker as there's some quiet static coming through. There's probably something still going on with that CD drive.

 

[jmacz]

Interesting... I ran some MacTest Pro tests (disk bad block and random read tests). The tests were done against the main drive (1.5GB HD image via a ZuluSCSI). Multiple runs with each test. The only differences between the tests listed below.

• CD-ROM completely removed
  • successful test runs
• CD-ROM connected (front panel board connected, scsi cable connected, audio connector connected)
  • failed bad block test (different blocks in each run); speaker pops with scsi io
• CD-ROM connected (front panel board disconnected)
  • failed bad block test (different blocks in each run); speaker pops with scsi io
• CD-ROM connected (front panel board and audio connector disconnected -- ie. only scsi cable connected)
  • failed bad block test (different blocks in each run)

This suggests something's wrong with the main board causing some bit corruption on the scsi bus. What's interesting is that the CD-ROM does read data and audio CDs, and plays audio CDs back via the speaker. So it's not a complete failure but possibly some interference or something.

 

[jmacz]

Resolved my issue today (I think).

I pulled the main CD-ROM logic board out to just give it another once over under a microscope. I smelled a very faint fishy smell so took a magnified view of all areas that had SMD caps previously. Didn't really notice anything but just in case I decided to reflow the pins on every IC near the previous cap locations. As I was reflowing the pins on an IC near the SCSI connector, I definitely smelled the fishy capacitor fluid smell.

When I had recapped the board, there was some leakage but it looked tiny and contained to underneath the cap. So I cleaned / neutralized those areas only. But looks like the cap fluid did make it to this IC. I decided to give the board a full IPA bath. After soaking it for an hour, I brushed around this IC and all areas near the previous replaced caps, then let it air dry overnight.

Upon testing it out, the speaker static/noise was gone. I then ran it through two passes of the disk test on MacTest Pro and both passed (previously with the issue, I always hit bad blocks on every run).

I'm hoping that was it and will continue watching it. But going forward, I need to bath each board in which I find even a trace of cap leakage.

 

[joshc]

Those CD drives can become a real mess from cap leakage, every one I have recapped has been quite bad, so this is not surprising, but it's great you figured it out!

 

[lobust]

Nice work!

I have an old thread on here somewhere, also a Q800, where the cd drive worked but had really distorted sound output. I didn't know about recapping these drives back then, so I was advised by members here to do so.

When I took it apart and saw the state of the board I was absolutely shocked it was working at all!

I have done four of these drives now, and they've all been in pretty bad shape.