I bought an LC630 in a local garage sale. It worked, but the hard drive was screaming, so I stripped down the machine, cleaned it out, and replaced the Apple/Quantum 500MB IDE with a WD of 400 MB or so. But the Mac wouldn't start after that. Completely dead.

I discovered that the IDE connector on the new drive was reversed compared to the original one.
I'd connected it the wrong way round. On a PC IDE bus, that wouldn't usually do permanent harm, but as far as I can tell there's no other reason for the Mac not firing up.

I've reconnected the drive correctly, cleaned all the connectors in sight, tried a different keyboard, etc etc. But no go.

My question is this; has anyone had a similar experience with this model, and if so, what was the fix. Have I blown the PSU, the motherboard or just my credibility :) ?

Does it not power up at all?

Was looking on www.lowendmac.com and found that the IDE controller on that system only supports 1 device (the cdrom should be scsi). So make sure the drive your using is setup for master. Inserting the data cable backwards wont kill anything (doing it to the power cable will smoke your drive, but that very hard to do).

Do you have a cdrom with an operating system (version 7.1 to 8.1) you can boot from? If you cant boot try disconnecting the drive entirely and boot from disk or cdrom to make sure your machine works.

You should be able to reset the pram on that machine (store machine settings) find the cuda putton and push it for 30 seconds (machine should be off).

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Give your dreams a chance.™ - Apple in the mid '90s

since you took it apart make sure the video ram, and main ram have been inserted back correctly.

I mentioned the IDE cable because he purchased his computer at a garage sale so I could have been rigged any number of ways.

The best way to troubleshoot a computer thats not even booting is to remove anything not necessary in making it turn on. Remove all drive cables, extra ram that wasnt there before you started messing with it (same for vram and cards). Make sure the power supply is connected to the mb (seen people forget that when they take stuff apart). Is the battery connected and in the correct orientation (removing it would kill the power the keyboard uses to start the system up). Check voltage on the battery too while your at it, they do die eventually.

2. Actually, LC630s run fine without the PRAM batt. My 630 has never had a PRAM batt for as long as I've had it.

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Give your dreams a chance.™ - Apple in the mid '90s

Didnt know the vable was permanently attached to the board. My experience is with 950/840av quadra's and 8500/7500 PM's

quote:

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Can you start the machine up from the keyboard without a pram battery?

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Warrior maclover5
68k Macintosh Liberation Army
Number of 68ks Liberated: 7
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1

Also WD drives will not work when set as master when they are the only drive on the IDE chain. You need to set the jumper across the bottom of the two of the pins closet to the IDE connector.

i.e Ide Conector| - - - /------\
____________| - - - |______|
| |
Short these two pins.

I just looked also removing the jumper completly should work also.

Also how you edit a post?

to edit your posts (you must be logged in) you can click the little pencil and paper icon...

quote:

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hmm... Maybe if you replaced it witn an apple labled drive? maybe stuff like that happens to 6x0X owners...

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Warrior maclover5
68k Macintosh Liberation Army
Number of 68ks Liberated: 7
Number of Contraband (PPC) Liberated from the Dumpster:
1

Thanks for the tip about WD drives not working when set as master, that could've caused some real hassles later on.

This LC630 came with several other machines, mostly Quadras. They all needed the PRAM zapped before they'd start. Must have been sitting around for a while.

Saturday afternoon is now set aside for this project. I'll disconnect/replace the PRAM battery. If that doesn't work, I'll pull out the PSU and go over it properly. I've never thrown away a Mac yet and do not intend to give up on this one.

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Give your dreams a chance.™ - Apple in the mid '90s

one funny thing... I did a complete rebuild on my 840av and it was real quiet... then I plugged the power back into the hard drive....

I guess that alot of apple labeled hdds are louder... maybe it's a Quantum thing?

The PSU appears OK, so the motherboard is now under suspicion. The most sensible thing to do now is wait for another LC630 to become available and track the fault by swapping parts between the two machines.

So this LC630 will be wrapped up and put in storage for the time being. The rest of the pile (Centris and LC models) will keep me occupied for now.

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Give your dreams a chance.™ - Apple in the mid '90s

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