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  1. tomlee59

    Rescuing Data From Newer Drive

    I've encountered two instances (same brand and model of drive) recently where the spindle motor developed a shorted winding, and cooked the motor driver (releasing all of the magic smoke upon which all electronics depends). I hope this is not your problem, for swapping circuit boards does not...
  2. tomlee59

    Lombard/Pismo VST Exp. Bay Floppy

    Not sure you got an answer to your question, so here's my shot at it: In addition to 120MB superfloppies, those drives will also read 1.44MB disks. Sadly, 800K (or 720K) disks are not supported, AFAIK.
  3. tomlee59

    Re-Celled 540c battery

    I haven't experienced any unusual 540-specific problems, but power bricks in general are notorious for developing intermittents of various kinds. The most common failure mode is for one (or more) internal wire to fatigue to the point of breakage. For a time...
  4. tomlee59

    Unhappy PowerBook 100

    Disconnect the hard drive and RAM altogether. After some delay, the 'book should display a blinking question mark. If it gets that far, then the logic board is likely fine. Add back the RAM, and see if all remains well, etc. If the 'book never gets to a blinking question mark, then you have more...
  5. tomlee59

    Replacement RAM Chips

    AFAIK, the X257 DRAMs are electrically- and pin-compatible with the X256 parts. An 81257 is (most likely) Hitachi's version of the 41257, with the latter being a CMOS version of the NMOS 41256. I can't say for certain, however, but that's my best guess.
  6. tomlee59

    Replacement RAM Chips

    Welcome to the wacky world o' DRAMs. At the time of the 64kb generation (the time of the 4164/4264), there were relatively few variants. That quickly changed, however. NMOS gave way to CMOS ( the "C" in 41256C), page-mode was supplemented by EDO, access times headed south, and variations on...
  7. tomlee59

    Aargh! Floppy disk help please!!

    Floppies can fail, or seem to fail, for many reasons. Some are: 1) The oxide layer (the brown stuff) has flaked off because of age. 2) The oxide layer has been abraded off (e.g., by a scratched or dirty head). 3) The drive that wrote the data is misaligned relative to the drive that is...
  8. tomlee59

    What PowerBook do I want?

    Tiny correction/clarification: The 3400c (and 2400) are electrically Cardbus compliant already. The only mod needed is in fact mechanical, to allow the differently-keyed Cardbus card to be inserted. The canonical fix is to modify the cardcage, but that involves a degree of surgery that many...
  9. tomlee59

    Troubled SE/30

    As usual, Wally has a great suggestion. It is not uncommon for gunk to foul up microswitches, fooling drives into thinking that there's a disk, misinterpreting the density, or thinking that the disk is write-protected.
  10. tomlee59

    Troubled SE/30

    Here are some things to try: 1) Boot from a floppy -- does that work? 2) Check power supply voltages. 3) Although swapping boards should've cleared PRAM, perhaps it's not a bad thing to try (cmd-option-P-R at startup; wait for three consecutive bongs). 4) Check pram battery. If it's sort of...
  11. tomlee59

    I can't believe it!

    A "1MB" floppy is the same as a 720kB, is the same as an 800K floppy...The 1MB designation refers to the unformatted capacity. Just to back up a bit, realize that the Disk Tools floppy that comes as part of a system installer disk set is a bootable disk. For System 6, it is a single 800K...
  12. tomlee59

    266MHZ Beige G3 mini tower buildup

    The retail discs are model-agnostic. However, the discs that Apple ships with a given computer are usually model-specific. If you've had success with using them on other models, you've gotten lucky (or those other models are basically of the same type).
  13. tomlee59

    3400 screen crapping out

    The standard things to check are the connectors, both at the motherboard and at the display panel itself. The latter in particular are somewhat infamous for developing poor contact over time. Often, simply pulling out the flex cable and reinserting it will fix things (for a while, at least)...
  14. tomlee59

    Replacing PB170 backlight ... with passive PB backlight?

    Regrettably,the "tunnel vision" problem is not caused by the CCFL backlighting slowly fading out -- it is caused by the LCD panel itself. The only cure is replacement of the panel proper.
  15. tomlee59

    SE

    Freezing is the wrong choice if the problem is stiction. It can only help if excessive read errors prevent booting/mounting/data recovery.
  16. tomlee59

    Vic-20 load

    You may not need 9VAC. IIRC (and I'll check on this for you later), that 9V goes directly to a full-wave bridge, and then a regulator. If so, then it may very well work when fed +12VDC or thereabouts.
  17. tomlee59

    Wireless Card for a Lombard 333Mhz

    That Linksys device is a router, not a card. Also, the original Airport cards used chips made by Lucent/Agere, not Broadcom. They are known in the wireless biz as the Hermes chipset. They were used by a number of vendors. The Dell TrueMobile 1150, for example, is essentially an Orinoco, and...
  18. tomlee59

    Apple AudioVision 14 with rotated raster

    First verify that the rotation is not due to a loose yoke. Check for the existence of electronic rotation adjustments, as LCGuy suggests. If the yoke is not loose, then the drift in rotation is electrical in nature. A 20-degree rotation is somewhat larger than what most such circuits typically...
  19. tomlee59

    Unhappy PowerBook 100

    With this little to go on, it's hard to say. But it sounds power-related. A reddish hue is consistent with undervoltage on the backlight (it can also be a worn bulb, of course), and the other symptoms are, also. And cease trying to charge that battery. It is dead, and irretrievably so. Keeping...
  20. tomlee59

    Need help connecting PowerBook 230 to a LAN and to the Web

    Once you do get the thing networked, here are some suggestions for suitable browsers. As you might suspect, your choices are somewhat limited. Don't expect modern webpages to render well. :) A fast, text-only browser is wannabe68k. I have used it on my Duos on dialup. If you must browse with...
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