New to Mac, got two SE/30s, hardware ID and some basic questions

[BadGoldEagle]

The caps my be too far gone for it to boot. You know what the next step is...  ;-)

Judging from the symptoms, it should bring it back to tip top condition. 

 

[keenerb]

Recapped the mac, blew one of the new capacitors on first power-up.



That's C9.    What do you think happened?  Could the capacitor have simple been bad?

 

[jhorvath911]

 

[keenerb]

View attachment 23188

I just realized that myself, reseated all the capacitors with the correct polarity but of course I'm short one now.  Think a ceramic cap could fill in temporarily?  I still have those vertical bars without C9 in place.

On an electolytic cap the band indicates negative, doesn't it?  Why would they change that for SMD???

 

[jhorvath911]

As long as the capacitor is of the correct rating and installed correctly it shouldn't matter what type it is. 

As for why the markings are backwards from how we expect them I have no idea.

I assume you cleaned the board after removing the old caps, if not you'll need to do that. If you post some pictures of the full logic board someone might see something for you to be checking.

 

[Bolle]

For tantalums it's always the positive side that's marked, no matter if SMD or through hole.

 

[keenerb]

Speaker is nice and loud even with the missing cap, but I don't think this is the standard Mac SE/30 boot sound?

 

[MOS8_030]

That is the "Chimes of Death"...

 

[keenerb]

Well that doesn't sound ominous at all.

 

[BadGoldEagle]

I think you can get away with no sound at all if C3 through C6 aren't installed but without C9, it sure won't boot. 

Was that the noise you barely heard before recapping? If so that doesn't bode well for that board... 

 

[keenerb]

I have no idea if that's what I heard.  It was EXTREMELY faint, it seemed like it was a low/high beep but impossible to tell.  More caps should be here Tuesday. 

 

[Bolle]

Slow chimes usually means it can't access RAM.

If you post some pictures of the full logic board someone might see something for you to be checking.

This

 

[keenerb]

Replaced all the 47uf capacitors and same behaviour, slow beeps of death.  On a hunch I pulled the RAM and swapped it aroudn a bit, and it seems that one set of simms must be bad.  The second set installed in slots 1 - 4 lets the machine boot!  Looks like the drive is dead, unsurprisingly.  Time to pick up one of those SD hard drive emulators.

I had the "simasimac" screen with the bad RAM and good capacitors, so maybe "bad caps" isn't the only reason for that particular issue.

Is there any way to get one of these working as a hard drive on the mac SE/30?  Web page says its' not supported but I'm an overly optimistic kind of guy.

https://www.bigmessowires.com/floppy-emu/

I also picked up a IIGS, would be nice to have a single solution for both systems..

 

[davidg5678]

KeenerB,


Although the FloppyEmu does Macintosh HD20 hard drive emulation, it is not compatible with an SE/30. It works on the other compact macs prior to the SE/30, but compatibility for the HD20 is not implemented in the ROM of the SE/30. (I think you can buy a 3rd party compatible ROM, but it costs just as much as a separate hard drive emulator.) 

I suggest looking at the SCSI2SD for hard drive emulation -it is a little fiddly to set up, but it works extremely well once it is. If you haven't already, I would definitely recommend following a floppy drive lubrication tutorial before trying to use the floppy drive and boot off of any floppies. An unlubricated drive can strip the teeth off of the gears in the ejection motor. There are replacements available on eBay if this has already happened, but it is best to avoid altogether. I have linked a great tutorial explaining how to do this.

Good Luck!

 

[nglevin]

This is not that practical, but you could boot off a System 6 floppy disk image on a FloppyEmu plugged into the external floppy drive port in the back, unplug the internal floppy drive from the logic board and remove it from the SE/30, and then have a second FloppyEmu plugged in to the same logic board socket that was used to connect the internal floppy drive through an even longer ribbon cable.

Although I think the SCSI2SD boards run for less than a FloppyEmu. This idea is probably not only awkward but more expensive as well.

 

[keenerb]

I really don't think this is the standard Mac SE/30 rom.  The internet tells me that the SE/30 rom was 256kb in size.

 

[bibilit]

There is 3 or 4 different types of SE/30 Roms (i should have one of each) hard to say from the picture, but brobably standard unit.

 

[keenerb]

The hard drive from the second SE/30 booted.  Mouse and keyboard I got from a IIGS system I bought works perfectly with it.

Pretty happy...