Hi Stephen,
Not having hands-on, there are a number of possibilities and solutions.
Can you boot from a floppy drive? Have any floppy tools? If you can
put your hands on an old FWB tools floppy set or some other floppy
diagnostic set, that would be a big help.
After completing this email, I realized there are several possibilities
but the first thing you might look at is whether or not you formatted
the drive or in some way disturbed the boot sector. Second, it is
possible you are seeing a gradual failure of the power supply due to old
capacitors.
******
Do what we call re-seating the connections. It's possible that the
connectors have acquired some corrosion. This goes for any cards or
sub-assemblies commonly found in older computers. Unplugging and
re-plugging each (all) connector (one at a time to avoid confusion) will
sometimes fix a connection problem. Sometimes - but not always -
seemingly innocuous acts will make a problem disappear.
More subtle problems can occur if there is any visible corrosion on the
circuit boards. Also, vibrations during shipping can cause weak (aka
"cold") solder joints to have invisible open circuits (i.e. broken
connections). Re-soldering a bad joint will fix the bad connection but
the trick is to spot the bad joint - a loupe or being severely
near-sighted will help, but having experience with cold solder joints is
better.
Let's hope it's not a bad circuit board or part. Some early computers
had poor quality capacitors in them.
Finally, it could be that you failed to secure the hard drive connectors
properly and one of the connectors is loose.
Hope that helps.
On 03/02/2016 12:00 PM, Stephen Collins wrote:
Hi everyone,
I'm new to the vintage Mac scene and have a Mac Classic here with an
internal Quantum 40MB hard drive and 4MB of memory. When I first got
it, everything booted and ran fine. It came with 6.0.7. Over about a
week, I noticed apps and even the Finder crashing. It got
progressively worse until I started getting the "disk with question
mark" image on startup.
So far, I have removed the drive and run SpinRite (from grc.com) on
level 2 and level 4. Everything passed 100%, no errors. I have booted
from internal ROM by holding CMD-OPT-O-X and sometimes the hard drive
appears and other times it does not.
I cleaned the internals and system board using a can of compressed
air, but so far no water or chemicals. What should I do next?
Thanks!
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