SE/30 startup issues

[John Ruadh]

Hi all,

I bought an SE/30 many years ago and every now again would power it up with no issues, but I haven't really powered it up for the last couple of years until last week. It started up fine and I did a bit of a clean out on old files and made some more disk space. But after powering down and starting it up the following day. I got no sound upon startup and just the no startup disk icon. Basically you can hear the HD spin up and then spin down.

I can boot from a floppy but Disk Aid can't see the scsi drive. I've tried hooking up an external scsi drive and booting from floppy and again Disk Aid can't see any scsi devices.

I opened the case checked the existing battery which was dead so I replaced the battery and tried again, with no luck. I tried restarting it and reseting the PRAM, no luck.

I opened the case and took out the motherboard and looked carefully for any obvious cap problems, but the board looks pretty clean including around the scsi chip.

It has 8mb of ram and a Dynaport access T card. Each ram slot has 1mb

My question is apart from recapping the board, which will need to happen sooner or later, is there anything I could check first of all that could narrow it down to make sure it is not scsi related or do you think straight out a recap would most likely fix it?

Thanks

 

[hunter44102]

The lack of sound is a classic 'capacitor' issue in SE/30

If you have original caps 25+ years old, its most definitely a cap related issue.  

Your recent use of the machine probably finished them off.

The good news is that with a one time re-cap of solid(tantalum) capacitors, your machine would never have the leak again

 

[apm]

You'll need to recap the board soon, but this sounds more straightforward: the hard drive is likely dead. It's very common for these old drives to fail. SCSI2SD is a good modern solution, not only more reliable but quieter, lower power, and with greater storage capacity.

 

[John Ruadh]

thanks for the replies, well looks like a recap is on the cards. I'll check the HD first just in case.

 

[Themk]

If you HDD spins up, and then spins down, its probably broken. Hopefully you can get all the issues resolved.