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SE/30 Woes

SlateBlue

Well-known member
techknight, that's awesome! Being such the PITA that it was, I'm glad you were able to revive the board. Sounds like it was an educational repair for you, but I had faith you'd be successful. Thank you for the incredible work.

 

techknight

Well-known member
Wow techknight, that is some seriously impressive diagnostic work.  Good job on getting the board back to life.

Edited to add, I have an emergency startup disk with the exact same folders:  System and Lido.  Lido is extremely handy to have around.
Yea, I was using my FloppyEmu, and I bought a SCSI2SD awhile back that I never used. So i decided to use it with this board and format the SD card, and make a copy. 

1, to make sure all peripheral ICs are working properly, and 2, it needed to be done. :p

With this machine, the SCSI2SD is impressive. Using 6.0.8 I had on my disk copied to the SD card, booted in just about 1 second. I have NEVER seen an early mac OS boot that fast outside of emulation. LOL. 

 
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just.in.time

Well-known member
That's some serious bootup speed. Eventually I will pick up a small fleet of the SCSI2SD adapters to move all my older macs away from their ever-against hard drives. Everyone that has used one seems to have really good experiences with them.

 

SlateBlue

Well-known member
I got the Mac fired up today. Hats off to techknight for the great work! Thankfully, it booted from the original 40 MB hard drive and appears to have 4 MB of memory. I think it has System 7 installed, but no useful apps. My Floppy Emu arrived in the mail yesterday, so I now have a way to load software onto the internal drive. To those of you who have SE/30s, how much RAM and which version of Mac OS do you recommend running? I would appreciate recommendations for games and applications, too.

 

just.in.time

Well-known member
I just got my SE/30 powered back on earlier today as well. Very excited to get it set up.

However, in response to your question about memory and OS: my SE FDHD has 4mb of ram, and I find 7.1 to be the best balance of ram usage vs features. 7.5 was taking up a noticeable bit more without any of the extra add ons that I have with my 7.1 install.

My SE/30 is sitting with 8mb right now (8*1mb). I'll be setting it up with 7.5.x. That said, I also have an Ethernet card to go with it. IF I can get that to work as well, then I will be switching the 1mb sticks for 4mb sticks giving me 32mb. Any more and my understanding is it begins to take a long time for the system to do the memory check at boot time. Since there is no Sleep mode, that may be annoying. Really boils down to personal preference.

As for games and apps:

Lido (disk utility. It's companion app, PMount allows you to set which partition to be the boot partition. Handy for a single disk multi partition setup. System Picker may be able to do this as well)

ShufflePuck Cafe (fun game with decent sounds)

Background (extension for B&W macs that lets you set a background image... Uses specific MacPaint format, so a little work required to convert images, but I like it)

SuperClock!(basically gives you 7.5s clock in 7/7.1... Maybe 6 as well?)

Moire cdev or After Dark 2.x (I enjoy these two with my vintage systems. Moire cdev is especially light on memory, supports hot corners, and can add a clock as well. Handy for system 6. Really any screen saver though. This is semi important)

... More to come to this list in a few days.

And for good practice, find a label maker and print out the date you installed the PRAM battery. Stick this label to the back. Changing at 5 year intervals will avoid the vast majority of battery leaks.

 

9166188

Well-known member
I like to thank those who posted in this thread, esp the snapshots by !techknight!

As a result, my newly acquired SE/30 has been finally released from "jail bar" and happy now!

I did some connectivity test by following techknight's motherboard wiring flyovers and found the same broken trace!

Hail to those who help others!   Thank YOU!   :)   :)   :)   

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