IIfx no power up

[tanaquil]

Today I dragged my IIfx out of the basement, where it has been sitting quietly for years. I honestly don't recall if it ever worked; I'm pretty sure someone gave it to me around 2002 and I shoved it down there without even testing it. (If I had tested it, I think I'd remember one way or the other.)

Plugging it in (using the same power cord I normally use for my IIsi) and pressing the power button is giving me zero response. No sound or reaction at all. (Power key on keyboard doesn't work either.) I disassembled the whole machine, testing it periodically as I removed components, and never got any response. 

The inside looks pretty clean, just the usual amount of light dust and tarnish. One of the two batteries (Maxell, shudder) had gone bad at one end, but the corrosion seems to be limited only to the battery holder; I can't see any corrosion at all on the upper or under side of the motherboard. (I tried powering up before and after removing the batteries. No change.)

Apart from the corroded battery holder, I can't see any signs of capacitor leakage on the main board at all, though I'm not an expert and probably wouldn't notice if caps were slightly swollen.

My question is: how likely is it that re-capping and/or replacing the power supply will fix my problem? I'm open to doing either or both. Not sure what order I should proceed in.

Uniserver is going to get a lot of business from me when I finally get my mess wrapped up at work and have some time to send all these boards off. I'm already planning to send in a relatively healthy SE/30 board.

Thanks for any advice!

 

[Unknown_K]

Without 2 working batteries any Mac II (ii,iix,iifx) will not start up at all.

 

[tanaquil]

Aha! Then I will start by replacing the batteries. I think I might have the right spares on hand. Will report back. (All advice still welcome.)

 

[Elfen]

Except for 3 caps, all of the caps on a IIfx are Black-Tantalum Caps and are least likely to fail. 1 is the dreaded cap that leaks on all the Macs so it needs to be replaced, and 2 are large axial caps that should be replaced if you get them.

But you can always try to jump start the IIfx with a battery pack of 2 AA's. If the PSU is good, it will start up after a jump start. Here's a Youtube Video on how to do it.

 

[tanaquil]

The saga continues...

After putting fresh batteries in the battery holders (fortunately I over-ordered the last time I got a batch of PRAM batteries), the computer started up all nice. It took me a little longer to get the RAM re-seated so that it didn't make a sad mac noise, and get everything else hooked back up.

Now I have a new problem: the image on the monitor is completely whacked. (I have a standard Mac RGB monitor that has always worked fine with my IIsi and other old macs.) I have a whole bunch of jittery lines and six disk images and six trash cans. I can't see well enough to manipulate anything with the mouse.

There are two nubus cards in this IIfx. One seems to be the standard video card, and that is the one that is producing the bad video image. The other I can't identify; it has a monitor-like plug, but also something that looks like a coaxial cable plug, and when I try to plug the monitor into that card, it won't produce any image on the monitor at all.

Is it possible that the video card in the computer is incompatible with my monitor? Should I try some other monitor, like a VGA? Or is there some other fix I should try first?

Thanks so much for the advice before. I'd still like to get it recapped at some point, but it doesn't seem urgent, unless caps are causing my weird video problem.

 

[Elfen]

NOOOO!!!!!

That second card is an Ethernet Card for Coaxial and AUI Cables!

OK. Lets hope there is no damage to the card(s) or the monitor. Pull out the cards and put them to the side. Test the monitor on the IIsi and make sure it works.

What kind of monitor is is? If it's the 12in color monitor it might not work as they were meant to be 512X84 resolution, which were used on many IIsi and Mac LCs. You would need the Mac 13in RGB Color Monitor which handles 640X480 resolution. A Multi-sync monitor can display it if you got the right Mac-VGA adapter.

Note: The IIsi can also display on the 13in color monitor with 640X480 resolution, as can the LC but the color depth will be reduced. But the Mac II cards have issues working on the tiny 12in color monitor made by apple (which was also used on the IIgs and some IIc's).

 

[tanaquil]

Haha, I was afraid I was plugging in something wrong with the second card. It doesn't seem to have done any harm, at least that I can tell (I switched back to the previous monitor config and it was doing the same thing as before).

I don't exactly know what kind of monitor it is, but it could be a 12 inch. I think I have a multisync monitor with a vga adapter in the basement, I'll try that. Thanks!

 

[Elfen]

That's great. Apple sold millions of those tiny 12in monitors, but at the same time did not write into the monitor control panel how to access them on a Mac II video cards. In fact many of them came for "free" with a purchase of a Performa 400 and 425 (Mac LC/LCIIs). They were not free, it was part of the price as a package deal. They were optional on the IIgs and IIc's.

What kind of video card is it? the 8Bit card "High Resolution Display Monitor Card" or the 24bit video card? That high resolution card does 640X480 at 256 colors nicely, but its a fixed resolution. The 24bit video card has more resolution options and the one best for the IIfx. (It's best for any Mac II...) The others (like the LCs, IIci, IIsi and so on) the resolution depends on how much VRAM is put in and in the case of the IIci/si you can put in video card in them as well and they would run better. Their resolutions start at the 512X384 level for that tiny 12in monitor and goes up from there, again depending n how much VRAM is in the system.

Good luck.

BTW - somewhere on this forum is my attempt at recapping my IIfx. It was surprisingly simple as I only replaced that 1 leaky cap I found on the board though I thought it was 3 caps. Having Tantalum Caps already in them, that IIfx is going to last longer than most Macs! I bought black Tantalum Caps to match the others. It was a bit pricey but god does the board look good!

My mistake, it's 2 of those leaky caps on the right side of the board. Now I remember, my daughter recapped this board as I was in the hospital from a bad effect of the medications I was taking then but I was going to do it though she did it for me. The thread is here:

https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/23651-its-alive/

 

[tanaquil]

The Multisync monitor worked, thanks so much for the tip. I still need to fiddle a bit with the dip switches on the VGA adapter to get the best resolution, but that can wait, I guess.

How would I be able to tell which video card is in the computer? Does it have a distinctive label on the card itself, or would I need to run diagnostic software on the computer?

The newest challenge is that the hard drive doesn't seem to want to mount (though I am able to get it to power up), but that is a more familiar challenge. The floppy drive does work, but the only system disks I had handy were 6.0.8, which are a bit limited in function!

Next, I guess I will spend some time diagnosing the old HD and maybe seeing if I can get the computer to work with another HD.

(Incidentally, the back of my other monitor tells me that it is a "High Resolution RGB Apple Monitor." Don't know what that means, but you will be glad to hear it is working as well as ever with the IIsi.)

 

[Elfen]

Congrats!!!

I know with the 8bit card it will say "High Resolution Display Monitor Card" on the top of the card, it has 2 rows of VRAM chips on it. Apple made 2 24 bit cards, one with slots to add more RAM to it and another that does not have slots but has 3 row of VRAM chips on it. And there are other Nubus Video Cards as well so you need to look at the card and see what it says.

The IIfx will boot from any system from System 6 to System 7.6.1. I have my IIfx on my Q950's HD until I can get a hard drive for it, and the system on it is 7.6.1 You can hack System 8 onto the IIfx, there are several tricks for it online but I would leave it at System 6 or 7, depending on what you want and need.

Hmmmm... The "High Resolution RGB Apple Monitor" sounds like the large 13in monitor Apple made for the Mac II Series. Damn thing weighs a ton! The 12in one weighs a lot less. But the "High Resolution RGB Apple Monitor" should work with the card. I'm scratching my head on this one. Could you post a 3/4 profile pic of it to show the front and side of it? That would be helpful.

 

[tanaquil]

Weird. I'll try to post some pictures of both monitor and card tomorrow.

While I'm at it, since everyone has been so helpful: what kind of hard drives can I swap into the IIfx? Is there an upper limit on how large a drive can be (I assume it has to be a 50 pin scsi internal drive)? I know the IIfx has special requirements for termination on an external scsi drive - would I have to do anything special to terminate an internal drive?

I have a couple of IIsi's not in current use, I should probably try swapping in a drive from one of them.

 

[CC_333]

It's mostly just like any Mac of that era. Any drive that will work on any other contemporary Mac will work fine in the IIfx. The only caveat that I'm aware of is that you need to take some special precautions regarding termination, due to the IIfx's unusual architecture.

Other than that, you should be fine. Maybe get a SCSI2SD?

c

 

[Elfen]

For me, my IIfx has a terminator which the ribbon goes into and the that plugs into the board. On the drive side, the terminating resistors should be on the hard drive as well. So it is terminated on both sides of the cable.

 

[tanaquil]

The saga continues to continue...

I was able to confirm that the HD I pulled from my IIsi works in the IIfx, while the HD I pulled from the IIfx still won't work in the IIsi. It powers up, but gives a flashing question mark and can't be detected in HD SC Setup. I'm guessing it's just a bad drive.

Once I was able to start up the IIfx off of the swapped HD, which has 7.5 on it, I got a pretty high resolution on the NEC Multisync monitor, but I'm still having trouble getting the dip switches set right. (The Monitors control panel in 7.5 either refuses to open or opens and then crashes shortly afterward. I don't know if there is another utility that might work better.)

Some pictures of the (RGB) monitor and the video card, in Flickr, if I did this right (I kind of hate flickr):

https://flic.kr/s/aHskqhb3KK

I can't figure out what brand/model the video card is at all.

 

[tanaquil]

ETA (can't figure out how to edit previous comment): the video card appears to be a SuperMac Spectrum, although the Monitors control panel (when I finally got it working) gives no further modifier (just "Spectrum") - perhaps the earliest model, Spectrum/8? 

Having no luck finding the appropriate drivers. The SuperVideo 2.7.4 control panel appears to have crashed my HD with 7.5 installed (then again, for all I know, the drive had other problems).

I wonder if it might be easier just to shop for another video card, preferably packaged with drivers...

 

[CelGen]

It powers up, but gives a flashing question mark and can't be detected in HD SC Setup. I'm guessing it's just a bad drive.

HD SC Setup by default is a pain in the ass to work with. It only detects early apple certified drives depending on the version and will fail a disk on any hiccups. The first thing you could try is disabling the drive whitelist using resedit, or trying a patched version of Apple's Drive Setup (again, there's a disk whitelist you gotta disable) which is a lot more forgiving about potential issues.

The flashing question mark is simply the machine not seeing a useable system folder, but I've seen it do that on boxes that didn't have theirs "blessed" properly.

 

[tanaquil]

I'm setting these two (now two!) problematic drives aside until I can find a version of DiskWarrior that runs under system 7. (I am stalking ebay with hope. DiskWarrior 3, which has turned up in the past, supposedly bundles a version of DiskWarrior 2.)

I've been trying to use Norton and MacTools on the formerly working HD, but I think it's only made things worse. Oh well, I didn't have any data I cared about on that drive, so I'm sure I'll figure something out eventually. If I have to erase and reformat, so be it.

I am definitely thinking about the SCSI2SD option, as well. I've been wanting to try one of those.