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Mac SE with a weird PDS card

gobabushka

gobabushka

6502
Wel, I went to my favorite place for old electronics once again, Astro Too, and found a Mac SE just sittin on the floor! So I managed to get it for free! There was also an LC II, should I go back and get it, even tho it didnt power up?

EDITL Pics of the card will soon follow, i just need to get the machine in my house, past my dad first!

 
It's debatable about getting the LC. For free you can afford to take your chances with it, but you take a big risk if they want money for it. Those old LC's suffer from leaky capacitors the same as the SE/30's so if it's been sitting for while with leaks the motherboard could be rotted away in places. So basically if it's free, go for it, you have nothing to lose as it could be repairable or at the very least you might get some usable parts out of it.

 
At least pop the lid and check for obvious signs of goo around the caps. It may not power up because the PRAM battery is dead. If you have a good battery, take it in with you. If not, try the on for a while, quick off-on trick.

 
i went back today and found out why it was not powering up. the ps is clicking so i left it. and also ran into a fellow mla'er sawtoothdude

 
My LC stopped powering up a while ago due to the clicking PSU. I was in a hurry to test some things and was a bit annoyed 'cuz I didn't have another LC to use.

So, I ripped open the PSU to see what I could see. Lo, and behold: the caps in the PSU had leaked goo all over inside it. I gave it the kitchen-sink treatment and my LC is working fine again. Someday I'll have to recap the PSU but I bet that won't be for a few years at least.

 
well, i just cracked the SE open, and lo and behold, the card inside is none other that an AST Mac86!!!!!!! Any idea where i can find some drivers, im not sure that I can get the drivers off the internal hd, because its having severe stiction problems

 
Holy crap that was sweet find. There's not many SE's out there that can run DOS anymore. I have a similar thing for the Atari ST called the Supercharger that has an 8086 and came with MSDOS 4.01.

 
i just cant find the drivers for it! i am trying to get the hard drive to spin, but i think its dead, already tried hitting it and freezing it.

 
Never heard of that board, nice find. AST sold off their designs to Orange Micro, I like their 386 and 486 Nubus cards.

Whatever you do don't junk that SE HD, I would think the rare drivers are on that disk. Could be the heads are stuck to the platters.

 
What make/model hard drive is it? Several older drives, from IBM, MiniScribe, Quantum, Sony, and a few others had the bottom of the spindle motor exposed thru the lower case.

Sometimes, on some of these older drives, removing the drive's PCB and giving the spindle motor a LIGHT spin will be enough to break the stiction.

 
i really wanted one of the Orange Micro Athlon-based cards back in the day. of course, there are none on ebay because nobody bought them in the first place :-/

 
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