Random Sad Macs? Reseat the Classic Memory Expansion

[notcrazy_iminsane]

So, my good ol' temperamental Classic is at it again. After the time of success of booting from the ROM (hard drive is still dead and unconnected) to be able to do work on floppies as needed, it decided to start throwing random Sad Macs at me after placing the memory expansion card back in. Prior to all of my work on this Classic, the expansion card came with it and was working before. I'll do a quick rundown of how setup went today:

Put the logic board back in the Classic without the card.

Turn on Classic. Did the ? disk. Forgot to plug in the keyboard to boot off the ROM.

Turn off Classic.

Dug out the keyboard (I know it's my Mac one. All the Apple logos make it a hard miss) and plugged it in as well as the memory expansion card.

Turn on Classic.

Jail bars! No! After a while, jail bars fade into Sad Mac.

Random Sad Mac code every time. I occasionally got 00000004 00000400 a few times in a row.

Jail bars point to the memory. Alright, I'm on to something. I open the case back up and look the card over, do a few tests only to realize...

I didn't fully seat the card! A simple oversight that might've proved to be someone else's migraine down the road. So just in case someone get a memory expansion card for a Classic and ran into this problem. Don't instantly assume that card is bad! Sometimes you gotta push it in good. Here's some pictures of the random Sad Macs I nabbed and some of the deformities to the jail bars from an improperly seated card.

One thing to note about these jail bars is that they'll slowly disappear after the Sad Mac is displayed. Sometimes they'll leave fragments, sometimes they'll take the whole screen in a garbled mess of black and white pixels. The bars are rarely solid and almost always fade away.













I just thought I'd make this post real quick for people who might end up overlooking the memory expansion card and if it's not seated right, get those random Sad Macs, or just like looking at Sad Macs for whatever reason.   I was also about to turn to help from the army if I couldn't find that my simple oversight was the problem.

 

[uniserver]

the main board and the A/B have been re-caped?

 

[Elfen]

If you are using the memory expander slot, you need to be careful in putting in the card as well. I have see 1 bent pin cause major headaches because the bent pin does not go where it needs to go to and sometimes short out another pin. Straightening a bent pin can be dangerous as well as it might break while being bent back into place.

One needs to line up the card straight with the connector and push it down gently until it hits bottom and keep pressing for a while. As crazy as it may sound, I seen one slot (not a Mac memory slot but a PC AGP slot) spit out a card if this is not done. You push in the card and release it, and a few seconds you see the card slowly rise up and then "POP!" it jumps off the slot! Talk about having a ghost in the machine! But pushing the card in and holding it down for a while seems to make the slot happy to keep the card in place.

 

[notcrazy_iminsane]

the main board and the A/B have been re-caped?

This one has had a total recap. All it needs is its own SCSI drive since the 40mb one it came with is currently toasted. I've been playing with the drive to find a method to bring it back to life with little success.

And I can't possibly imagine a computer spitting a card out. I think that'd scare me out of my wits! The closest I got to such a thing was when I was putting the second graphics card into my desktop. I have a naaaaaasty habit of not seating a card all the way. Left it out just by a little bit and knocked the tower while it was running. Locked up everything. I had one big sigh of relief once I found the problem and nothing was fried. I would not have been happy having to replace components in my desktop over a small oversight like that.