Color Classic Brought Back to Life

[BlueTrepidation]

Hello everyone,

Today I recapped and washed the motherboard in my Color Classic. Before the machine would not power up when pressing the power key on the keyboard. The machine now posts. Next, I opened the faulty hard drive. I noticed the heads seemed sticky in the parked position. I dropped the heads off the edge of the disk to gain access to the inside of the lower arm. From there I could see a smudge mark where a rubber bumper makes contact. After adding a coating of oil to this location the hard drive came back to life! Now I have an OS to boot into. Last, I'm stuck at the point in the attached picture. Looks like the finder is trying to initialize the boot disk? Anyone know a way around this? Shift boot didn't do the trick. 

Thanks,
A.J.

 

[hunter44102]

Hmm interesting - someone here had the same issue with color classic, I didn't read it all but he thinks it started with the analog board mod:

http://www.voy.com/24978/4/1711.html

Good job on getting the hard drive going!

 

[hunter44102]

"It WAS the harness. It took a couple of weeks, but I got another CC and another 630 harness. I first switched the two chassises [?] to see if the analog board had anything to with it; it did not. (That was a mistaken "newbie" assumption on my part.) I then wired the new connector harness and installed it in the original CC. It worked like a charm - no "disk initialization error". Furthermore, the picture on the monitor is beautiful, very little border and no distortion (hi-res upgrade).

I checked the old harness with a meter and it seems that all wires conduct just fine. Maybe it was a crossed wire or a loose connector. 

I did a regular VGA upgrade on the newer CC, but it has fat black borders. I might try the capacitor fix. I have a 575 board in it running 7.5.1 (I think). I might upgrade it to a PowerCC too, or install a CD, or a Zip drive, or a... - I'm heady with success here!! "

 

[techknight]

check to make sure your floppy disk drive isnt in the down position. May need to restore the FDD.