Sad Mac on Performa 635CD

[Juliet Elysa]

Hey y'all! Hope everyone's been doing alright! Life has been insane for me the last couple of years (especially this one...), so my Macs have kinda taken a back burner until tonight. My oldest daughter officially inherited my beloved Performa, and when she went to play some games a couple of hours ago it finally happened. A wild Sad Mac appeared, with the code 0000000E 0000FD00. Where should I start with troubleshooting this? Dr. Google has been very little help...

Miranda inherited my Sad Mac phobia, and tonight she turned on the Performa in her almost completely dark bedroom right after waking up from a bad nightmare. Probably the worst way to experience your first wild Sad Mac!

 

[Papichulo]

yah that happened to me when i was little. it probably is the capacitors inside the performa or the ram. just take some pics of the inside of the computer mabie somebody knows. 

 

[Juliet Elysa]

It's well overdue for a recap, like all of my Macs. My fiancee and I were planning on having a recap/bomb battery removal party sometime this summer, but she passed away in May and of course I don't know how to solder yet so I can't do it myself.  I'll try to get some logic board pics this weekend, work has me up to my ears in assignments (the joys of having a management position!) so I won't have time before then.

My first wild Sad Mac story was unusual to say the least. My goddaughter was two at the time, and she somehow managed to get the interrupt button on my Mac Plus jammed with something sticky so it was always pressed. Cleaning that out was... fun.  :lol:  Needless to say, she was not allowed around my computers unsupervised for a while!

 

[cheesestraws]

0000000E 0000FD00

This is a little out of my area of expertise, aside from knowing what keywords I always google for to diagnose sad macs, but: according to this page: https://udcf.gla.ac.uk/~gwm1h/Error_Codes/Sad_Mac_Codes.html (scroll down to "SE and II codes", which tell you what the longer ones mean), this is a data bus error, and it suggests perhaps a bad SIMM.  So before you do anything any more intrusive, perhaps swapping the SIMMs out for known-good ones (if you have spares) might be a good shout.

It's well overdue for a recap, like all of my Macs. My fiancee and I were planning on having a recap/bomb battery removal party sometime this summer, but she passed away in May and of course I don't know how to solder yet so I can't do it myself.  I'll try to get some logic board pics this weekend, work has me up to my ears in assignments (the joys of having a management position!) so I won't have time before then.

I'm sorry to hear about your fiancee :-( .  Recapping is certainly worthwhile, though my soldering skills are so questionable that I, too, am putting a lot of mine off that shouldn't be put off.

 

[Juliet Elysa]

This is a little out of my area of expertise, aside from knowing what keywords I always google for to diagnose sad macs, but: according to this page: https://udcf.gla.ac.uk/~gwm1h/Error_Codes/Sad_Mac_Codes.html (scroll down to "SE and II codes", which tell you what the longer ones mean), this is a data bus error, and it suggests perhaps a bad SIMM.  So before you do anything any more intrusive, perhaps swapping the SIMMs out for known-good ones (if you have spares) might be a good shout.

That page is super helpful, thank you! I should be able to borrow some SIMMs for testing, and I've been thinking of maxing out the RAM anyways so if it does turn out to be a SIMM problem it's a perfect excuse to do that.

 

[joshc]

Sad Macs can also be caused by dead/dying hard drives or a hard drive in the wrong configuration, or a drive with a bad/corrupted OS installed on it.

 

[Juliet Elysa]

Sad Macs can also be caused by dead/dying hard drives or a hard drive in the wrong configuration, or a drive with a bad/corrupted OS installed on it.

The hard drive does seem suspect, Miranda did say that it was noticeably slower the last few weeks and she got more bombs than usual. There was no hard drive activity during my tests either, though I can't recall when it spins up during a normal boot. I was able to borrow one known good stick of RAM for testing, and with the good memory installed the Sad Mac still appeared with the same code, but it took a second or two longer to come up than with the original RAM. Not sure what to make of the delay, if anything. Checking the hard drive will be my next step, maybe the friend I borrowed the RAM from has a compatible, known good drive I can use...

 

[Juliet Elysa]

This case is closed, and I figured y'all would like to know how it went! The hard drive was indeed the culprit. But despite how bad the problem was (Sad Mac and no drive activity), the drive's not totally dead! My friend has an empty external hard drive case and a SCSI to IDE adapter. We were bored today and figured we had nothing to lose, so we decided to combine the two and see what happened.

A miracle, that's what! We had the drive hanging vertically from the edge of the desk (with me supporting it, it wasn't dangling from the connector) due to a lack of space, and after a few power cycles it spun up! Which is something that hadn't happened in our days worth of trying. SCSIProbe was even able to mount it, eventually! I'm not sure if the adapter and/or the vertical position actually had an effect or if it's just a coincidence, but either way Miranda and I are delighted that we were able to save her data! She had years worth of art and writing on that drive, so she was understandably devastated when I told her it had died. The data was backed up on multiple floppies, but she misplaced the disks and hasn't been able to find them! :lol:  She's seriously her mother's daughter!

So, the Performa is up and running with a replacement drive, and the precious files are safe! Can't ask for a much better Sad Mac outcome than that! Minus the trauma of initially encountering the crash in the dark, of course...