Problems, problems...Where do I begin?

[macintime]

:beige:

To all the devoted and helpful users, hello. As my first post on this forum, I can only hope from now on to have the same level of excitement as some people around here! I have a small collection of 68k and OW PPC Macs, which I started accumulating in 1998. There are some I would like to restore. In order to do this, I've been reading through guides, articles, posts, videos, sites, etc. The whole gamut...

And yet I've done little to them, and as they languish with time, I've done relatively nothing. The things holding me back are as follows:

1) For my compact Macs, I am still afraid to discharge a CRT, since I have to do a few swaps. One has a broken yoke and the other's analog board is dead. I have a flathead with wire around it, but I will probably buy a proper discharge tool. Even then, how will I know if it really discharged if there no audible crack. They say you won't know how to do something until you try it. EXCEPT in this case failure is a nasty shock or death. xx(

2) Yes, their caps have belched electrolyte, probably destroying some pads or traces. This has already claimed my IIci SCSI channel (external works) and my Classic II SCSI channel (not sure). I don't know where to start with this besides the suggested methods of cleaning. Did this to my Classic II board. Fixed the jail pattern at boot, but now SCSI is dead. :-/

3) I barely know how to solder, let alone try to attack SMD capacitors. With a Weller 25-watt soldering iron, I could practice on a dead winmodem card...

4) How to test dead traces? Multimeter? How to fix them properly?

5) Rather than burn some C-Notes on an A-Card bridge or Monster CF, someone I know has some NOS Ultra-Wide 16-bit SCSI-3 SCA80 hard drives. I'd rather use those. Now, if I get a simple, low-profile adapter (passive or active?), will it still work with SE/30 level SCSI, albeit bottle-necked?

6) I don't think I know how to setup or terminate SCSI properly because when I had an SE/30 that was working, I could not mount any of my external SCSI CD-ROM drives. This sucks. I know it's probably simple.

7) Cooling/Fan replacement: I think I have this one figured out. A Silenx 60mm. However, I may want something that moves more air.

Now I'm not asking one person to answer all at once. I just want a bit of feedback from different people who have relevant experience. I have a lot of hardware and software PC/MAC experience, but rarely delved into hard electronics/board components repair. These are the things that, when I pour over them in my mind, makes me hesitate any kind of restoration. When I did get the courage, some new thing screws up.

AGGGHHHH Where do I start guys?

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Welcome aboard, new chum! :approve:

Practice discharging CRTs that haven't been on for a long time . . . they don't really need it, but it's probably good practice.

Me, I've never discharged a Compact Mac in 25 years of using and hacking them, I'm careful when they're hot, i bang 'em around when they're (ostensibly) not!

You're not going to be killed, even by the nastiest 9" B&W CRT that ever roamed the planet. Color CRTs are a different story entirely . . .

. . . CZRRRRTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! xx(

Like anything else when it comes to repairing, modifying or building something, start your projects small and pretty soon you'll be tackling things you'd never dreamed you could.

 

[Mk.558]

1) A certain individual once said (probably on here) that the quickest, fastest way to discharge a CRT is the following (or quite like it):

a) Shut down the Mac, but don't turn it off. Leave the "You may now turn off your Macintosh." dialog open.

B) Turn the brightness to the maximum.

c) Turn off the machine.

d) Don't worry about it.

If it's been sitting for awhile, it's long ago self-discharged. It's a over-rated issue, I believe with the SE and higher (SE/30 for sure) a resistor was implanted to bleed off pretty much all of the residual voltage after shutoff.

3) If you don't know how to solder, let someone else who does work on it. Otherwise we just might get a repeat of a certain recent thread...

4) Ohm-meter at minimum, a DMM with a audible test mode is better. Helps if you have the schematics. (I only have a pinout for an SE/30)

5 and 6) Others on the board will be able to give you a knowledgeable answer.

7) It's enough. Unless you're duplicating JDW's Power SE/30 (accelerator, ethernet card, Micron Xceed, supplemental internal PSU, the lot) then even the stock fan is plenty.

 

[macintime]

Removing system boards and hard drives, no problem. But I had to make absolutely sure about all this as I will be grasping and removing the video board to replace the actual CRTs, and one has a dead analog board, which I will likely harvest from an SE. So, a lot of handling.

Not interested in going full-on with this, but I would like fan noise with better heat dissipation, because the SCSI I want to put in happens to be 7200rpm. I'll probably put a heatsink on the drive.

Also, I want to clarify that I have soldered before, DC jacks on laptops, some large caps and the like. Saw the thread, watched the videos. I would never let it get to that point. As you can tell, I am a bit cautious The concern for me is the small margin of error on SMDs. I've noticed your diagram Mk from two weeks ago. Very handy.

I've self-taught myself everything up to this point, anyway. So, it seems logical to continue in that tradition of trial and error.

Thanks to you both!

About 5) and 6)

Anyone know about the SCSI-3 SCA80 drive and if it'll work with an SE/30? Also, the external CD drives are Apple enclosures, caddy-type. How do I mount them?

I'm glad I raid for Macs in bulk ;-) I have extra stuff to work with! Just gotta get more handy with repairs because that's par for the course with these classics.

 

[zuiko21]

Hi and welcome!

About 5 and 6:

5) I have used several 80 pin SCA drives with my vintage Macs, with great success -- within their expected limits of course. I'm using an inexpensive SCA-to-50pin converter, I assume without termination of the unused byte... but just a few things to consider:

-Up to Ultra-160 SCSI (aka Ultra-3) support for "narrow" (8-bit, as used on the Macs) transfers is mandatory, so any disk will do... however, since Ultra-320 / Ultra-4 that mode became optional: some drives will support it, some won't. I've got a 73 GB HP Ultra-4 drive that does work fine with the Macs (don't recall the exact model, though). The SE/30 SCSI bus won't go over 2 MB/s, anyway -- some "fast" disks may score even lower; but the short access time of a fast disk is always welcome.

-Those disks are most unlikely to be "Apple certified", thus the usual Apple formatting utilities will refuse to work with them. You either need a third-party formatter or a patched Apple utility.

-The choice of formatting utility determines performance, compatibility and stability. I usually work with a patched version of Apple's Drive Setup 1.5, but the installed driver seems to prevent the 020/030 machines to boot from it -- although it mounts fine after booting from elsewhere. On the other hand, the older Apple HD SC setup utility doesn't seem to work with disks larger than 2 GB

-About partition sizes: everything just below 2 GB will be fine with any Mac, any OS version. Depending on the model and OS version, anything over that may or may not mount. Partitions over 4 GB do need "modern" machines and/or OSs. It seems that the mere presence of a single "large" partition will prevent mounting any partition on a '030 with 7.5.5, while the same disk on a '040 on 7.5.3 is at least capable of mounting those below 4 GB. '040 on 7.6.1 did mount all (Standard HFS, of course). Drive Setup won't let you specify more than 8 "user" partitions on a disk.

6) Assuming you have no conflicting SCSI ID's, you may check for termination issues with utilities like SCSI Probe, Gauge Series' SCSI Info and my favourite: Mt. Everything. If the disk doesn't show up or an error is reported, try things like having the terminator on and off, or another cable.

But maybe you're just missing the driver on the SE/30's system folder. Being Apple branded drives, any version of the Apple driver will do. By the way, if a bootable CD (not necessarily with a System version suitable for the SE/30) is in the drive, powered and spinning at the time of power-up, it should load the driver from that CD and any disk will mount fine afterwards, without any extensions installed on the boot device!

Hope this helps,

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Thanks for the tip on Mt. Everything, z, I'll have to find that one, never heard of it!

Apple Formatting Utilities HARD DISK TOOLKIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 'nuf said

 

[Mk.558]

Mt. Everything 1.1.1 doesn't run under System 6 unless you put in the System Folder so it will load upon booting. Under System 7+, it can load fine without being loaded upon boot.

 

[zuiko21]

You're right, Control Panels weren't treated as mini-applications until System 7.

The nice thing about Mt. Everything is that, besides being able to use the driver installed on disk (like any other SCSI-mounting utility), it can use its own driver, leaving the disk untouched -- pretty slow, but very safe; claimed to be able to rescue data from failing disks!

I don't have any experience with HDT... maybe it's installed in the HD of some recent purchases, I'll check in case I could give it a try. My first third-party formatting software (came with a Fujitsu MO drive) was FormatterFive, and it was extremely buggy xx( That experience biased me towards Apple utilities; despite their quirks, they have worked well for me.

 

[Bunsen]

Lido is another useful 3rd party formatting util to keep in your toolkit.