Well IIfx Fans, this is a monumental update.
Quick backstory. My “little brother” bought a house with some old, small office PBX gear I put up for grabs on the Trading Post which
@ilitch64 wanted. This evolved into me going to a VCF workshop on 3/24 in Wall, NJ to deliver the PBX gear at which time
@ilitch64 would work on the IIfx hoping to bring it back to life.
At the workshop the two leaked caps at C9 and C24 were removed as were the bombed battery holders.
The board was then washed in the sink and treated to address the corrosion areas. New battery holders and tantalum capacitors were soldered on, and
@ilitch64 tested out several traces in the affected areas and identified a few in need of repair. Two required bodge wires while the others were fixed in other ways (will let him specify). As this work was being done
@ilitch64 was great with explaining what was going on and answering my many questions, like what’s the differences between a trace and a via or what does reflowing mean? The work took something like three hours and I was fascinated for every single moment!
After letting the board dry and not having time to work on the machine for a week, I finally got down to business on Sunday.
I put everything back together except I only used the 4 x 1MB SIMMs because I didn’t like the looks of one of the 4MB SIMMs and I also left off the HD for first boot. Then the scary moment of truth… eyes closed…quick prayer…hit power button…FAN SPINNING!!!! BONG!!!!!!!! MONITOR ON!!!!!!!!! ? DISK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!OMG IT’S ALIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!





After several “YES! YES! YES!” shouts and a bit of jumping for joy I then tried to boot off the hard drive which did work and came up with A/UX…interesting!
That was about as far as I got on Sunday. Since then I’ve put a different hard drive in with System 7.1 and I’ve worked on cleaning the 4MB SIMM. Unfortunately that SIMM must have been the one next to the batteries and was very corroded, I don’t think it will work again, or at least won’t work within my abilities. I did try the 4 x 4MB SIMMs in the machine and got the very unhappy RAM bad chimes.
I’ve also replaced the Toby card with a SuperMac Spectrum 24 IV. Next need to get LocalTalking to my PM 7500 to start transferring software and SuperMac drivers. Only having 4MB of RAM is a bummer but I’ll look to get more when I have some cash to burn. The IIfx also gets my beloved AEK, no other KB would do! I should also archive the original A/UX hard drive as
@ilitch64 suggested but could use some advice on how to do this from the community.
As I said in my profile post, many people to thank for their help along the way. Obviously
@ilitch64 is the hero of this little saga and props to
@Dude.JediKnight who was also at the workshop and offered ongoing encouragement,
@joshc has provided mucho vital IIfx info, and many in this thread have offered additional support and encouragement. Then there’s
@Phipli …no comment needed
Finally, to answer
@luRaichu 's profile post question more thoroughly. The penguin is a cartoon character named Badtz-Maru and he’s the center of a superstition that started in 2001 or so (very early in my IT career). We had to perform an intrusive DB maintenance on a critical production system, I had only seen it done, hadn’t done it yet myself. I asked my boss if he was going to run it, he told me I should do it. I asked if he was sure I was ready, he said yes, you got it, and Badtz will help you. His kids loved the Badtz character and gave him a small stuffed animal for his desk at work. He tossed me the stuffed animal, Badtz was placed on top of the DB server, and I ran the maintenance and brought the system back online without issue. Ever since then, Badtz has been called in to help with dicey system work. He has the power to intimidate systems into cooperating!