Quadra 610: can I get it back to life?

[andreadandrea]

Hallo everybody,

I was adding new devices to my old Quadra 610 (with 7.5.1 installed).

I connected a Quantum ST2.1S HD and after a little I was able to initialize it and get it mounted as scsi id 1.

Then I took this HD out and connected a AppleCD 300i as scsi id 3.

I could not recognise it, I mean, I saw it in the scsi bus but could not mount it. I tried several scsi tools (including SCSI Probe and an old HDT version) but then, suddenly, the mac went freezed. After many tries, I had to reset it.

After this moment it started to make the chimes of death on startup :-(

I took out every thing: vram, ram, all scsi, floppy, pram battery, tested all startup key combinations I know, but nothing: always chimes of death.

Also, I can't get any picture out of the screen... so I don't know if there is any error number.

The only I know is that on startup I get: the normal startup chime and immediately after the chimes of death; if connected, the HD spins up but does not boot, the cdrom makes no sign of life, the floppy does not boot, too.

I suspect of any hw failure at scsi controller or video controller.

Any hint or advice will be highly appreciated!!!

byebye

Andrea D'Andrea

 

[porter]

Is the PRAM battery good?

 

[Dennis Nedry]

That doesn't sound good. Let it sit for a day or two with the battery out and try it again. I suppose you could try ON - OFF - ON but I doubt that will make any difference. To do this, turn the Mac on and after a few seconds, quickly turn it off and back on.

This is the way to get some old Macs to work with a dead battery. Maybe worth trying, probably not. Maybe you dropped a screw or metal shaving into the case and it's touching somewhere? Remove anything loose and take the whole thing and shake it around upside down to see if anything might fall out.

If nothing works, I'd look into finding a Power Macintosh 6100 (aka Performa 611x) to replace it, which is nearly identical to the Quadra 610 except it's a Power Mac. These are by far the most common old Mac right now, at least around here. I have 10 of them, 9 were free! The 6100 should be able to do most things the Quadra could do.

 

[andreadandrea]

That doesn't sound good.

No, not at all!

The pram battery is brand new from the shop.

At the moment of the problem I was actually using the mac with that battery.

In the last period it was a little bit inestable: it sometimes stopped suddenly during the boot or during the running of some software.

I wanted to do a backup but had no time :-(

I think that the problem is that it freezed while I was testing the scsi bus and trying to mount a device. Maybe the controller became internally fu%$ed up for this reason... I can't understand why it does not floppy boot...

If I don't get any idea (I read somewere in the forum of putting the motherboard in the dishwasher to take out the dirt, but I guess it's a joke, isn't it?), I will have to find a "new" motherboard or maybe a full Quadra or old PM to read my HD.

The problem is that here is not USA and there's not so many old Apple hw around at all.

Any suggestion is welcome, including reference to shops that sell and send motherboards at a fair price.

byebye

Andrea

 

[porter]

.... including reference to shops that sell and send motherboards at a fair price.

Don't bother. Get another complete 2nd hand machine.

 

[Tarmas]

Were your SCSI drives terminated correctly? This might have been the cause of your Quadra's instability, though I've never heard of a case when improper termination actualy fried the SCSI bus.

 

[applefreak]

Pram reset ?

 

[Dennis Nedry]

Your motherboard is most likely bad. Most components can't be replaced on the board except capacitors. You could try cleaning it different ways, at this point there isn't much to lose. Make sure it's absolutely dry before turning it on again, though.

 

[z180]

On my 6100 almost all stuff is soldered on,even 8MB RAM.

 

[andreadandrea]

I kept a whole day the pram battery out of the motherboard, but no way it starts up, sadly.

The termination was ok, from what I can see. Anyway a bad termination should make a bad signal propagation, not fry out any decent circuit, I suppose...

Even if in that very moment I was reeeally mad and sad foreseeng the death of my beloved mac, now with a cold mind I really think there is not much to do... soldering (decently) or fixing capacitors is out of my capabilities...

What I'll try to do is to find out any other second hand low end mac to load my hd on. I'd like a Quadra best than a PM btw, but now, years after, it's hard indeed to find anything out here.

Anyway, thanks for the ideas and if you have new ones feel free to add them up to the thread: I'll appreciate them (I'm not throwing my mac away while I still have some space in the flat...).

byebye

Andrea