This is part two of an epic saga about one man and his Macintosh SE. If you missed the first part or maybe you just need to get a quick refresh about part one, feel free to go back and enjoy it again.
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With the Mac SE’s hard drive promptly failing after installing System 6.0.8, I knew I had to fix it. The only problem, was staying within my preset budget of zero dollars. I posted a “Want to Buy” ad on the Low End Mac swap list. There were a few people who offered drives for sale, but the prices were out of my range. It was going to be tough to justify a $40 hard drive on a free computer to my wife.
The next thing that came to mind was trying to make a trade. I had a particular 17″ iMac G5 that had a failed power supply unit that just needed to be recapped. It was in mint condition, with the original box, power cable, keyboard, and mouse. The only things that were missing were the software discs that come with it when bought new. I decided to spend the $7 for some capacitors and fix the power supply unit.
Through a stroke of luck (or possibly pity), a random post by myself on Low End Mac’s Facebook page led to a series of messages with Low End Mac’s head honcho, Dan Knight. It had started off innocently enough by telling me he had a spare IIfxand a spare Quadra 950. If you read the previous installment in this series, you know those were the two I was originally searching for. We made a deal to trade my iMac for his IIfx, Quadra 950, a 13″ RGB monitor, a SCSI hard drive for the SE, an AAUI RJ-45 ethernet connector, an Apple Extended Keyboard, a SCSI CD-ROM, and a tear drop ADB mouse. What a deal. All I had to do was recap the power supply in the iMac while he dug out the IIfx and the Quadra, and we were good to go.
The recap procedure was somewhat intense. The way Apple designed the iMac G5’s circuit board for the power supply doesn’t allow some of the capacitors to be fully seated on the circuit board. There simply wasn’t enough room, and they had to be soldered in with about 1/4″ of space between the bottom of the capacitor and the board. It took about an hour and half from start to finish, but I got it all done and the iMac was up and running like a champ.
I met with Dan a few days after repairing the iMac, and we did the swap. Dan is the founder of Low End Mac and has a nice collection of Mac hardware. After loading up some of the fastest and biggest Apple computers that had been built in their respective timeframes, I headed back home. It was a good deal for both sides. Dan got a beautiful G5 iMac to help round off his Mac collection, and I picked up the two Macs I’ve wanted since I first saw them.
Once back home, I enlisted my oldest son to help bring the gear in from the van. If you’ve never seen a Quadra 950 in person, let me just let you – it’s massive. The IIfx is also a larger computer, but the Quadra makes it look tiny.
After bringing in all of the gear, I set about installing the newly acquired hard drive into my SE. The original hard drive in the Macintosh SE was a 20MB Miniscribe drive. It was replaced with a 230MB Quantum hard drive. It uses the same 50 pin SCSI connector and was told it was probably formatted.
To tear down a compact Macintosh, you need a T15 Torx screwdriver that is at least 8″ long. The longer the better for the top two screws.
While I had the SE apart, I thought it would be a good time to check the capacitors, solder joints, and other points of failure in these early Macs. The caps on the power supply looked clean and unbulging. This was a good sign, but from the scrape marks I had seen on the fan I knew this wasn’t the first time someone had been inside this old computer. The inside was relatively clean. There was no visible cracking near the solder joints on the connectors.
I also decided to pull the four 1 MB RAM sticks from my other compact, a Macintosh Plus. My full time System 6 machine was going to be the SE, and I wanted it as nice as I could make it.
The inside of the Plus and the SE were very different. Besides the obvious changes of an internal SCSI connector and a fan on the SE, there were a great deal of changes to both the power supply and the main logic board.
When working inside a compact Mac make sure to be careful around the end of the tube for the CRT display. Overall, the Plus was much easier than the SE to work on and around.
After getting it all put together, I popped in Disk 1 of 4 of the System 6.0.8 install and flicked the power switch. The floppy drive sat quiet as the hard drive started to softly click and clack to life as a Happy Mac face smiled at me on the tiny 9″ display. It then switched over to the regular Welcome to Macintosh splash screen.
The thing that bothered me about this was that my SE was not reading from the floppy drive. Soon enough I was stopped at an error screen. According to the pop up box, some of the loaded extensions wouldn’t work because of the low amount of memory available. After clicking OK, I was greeted with a sparkling clean System 7.5 desktop. I have nothing against System 7.5; I love System 7.5. It really has no place on a compact Mac with 4 MB of RAM though, and I desperately wanted System 6 back in my life.
The issue was still that the floppy drive not reading and mounting the disk. I tried turning off the Mac, hoping it would eject the disk, but alas, the drive held firmly onto my disk.
Enough was enough, it was time to crack this bad boy back open and make sure that I had done the job right the first time. After removing the four screws and looking at the back of the floppy, I instantly saw the problem. It’s impossible for a floppy drive to read disks if it is not plugged in. After correcting the issue and screwing it back together, I switched it on again with the first System 6 install disk in. I grinned a grin of success as the floppy drive made the loud click noise as it was seated and started being read.
Once up on the bootable install disk, I erased the 230 MB drive and got about installing System 6.0.8. The install went smoothly enough and took less than 10 minutes. After one more reboot, I was using the 230 MB drive as a boot drive and making sure everything was fine with my SE.
The installation of the hard drive is easy as pie in this model of Mac, if you have the right tools and small amount of patience. If you have an old compact Mac that has some intermittent power issues, crazy screen problems, or just a bad drive, pop it open. If you are handy with a soldering iron, there are plenty of walk-throughs available through some simple internet searching.
In my next article I will be getting the Quadra 950 ready for some everyday file hosting.
Thanks for reading my article and feel free to leave your comments below or on Facebook.
Keywords: #macse #macintoshse #system6
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I had been on the lookout for another Mac to add to my collection. My wife had led me to believe that if I was so inclined to pick up another, that it should be free or very close to it. I posted some ads on the local buy/sell Facebook groups and even on the Low End Mac Swap List. I had a few offers from the LEM Swap List, but they weren’t what I was looking for. I wanted a fast 68K powered Mac.
I really like all of the computers from the “Snow White”’ design language. They remind me of my family’s first computer, an Apple IIc.
The Mac IIfx is by far my favorite from that generation of Macs. Anything that was coined with “wicked fast” had to be great, and I’ve never used a 68040 before, which also leads me to my next favorite 68k powered computer – the Quadra 900/950.
The case of the Quadra 900/950 is just ginormous. It was also the first Mac to have 6 expansion slots since the IIfx. I was really looking to find something to experiment with, and lots of expansion slots in a big ‘ole case would be perfect.
After a few weeks without a hit, I resorted to freecycle. For those that have never heard of freecycle, it is an email group that helps keep things out of landfills by donating to people that would use them. Boy, did my quarry fit this. I would be more than happy to drive somewhere to take a 20+ year old Mac that was sitting around collecting dust off someone’s hands. I was contacted by a local saying he had an old Mac and a printer that I could have. Score! We arranged a time and date for pickup, and I left to get the combo a few days later.
When I got there I was met at the door with a loaded compact Mac carry case with a keyboard sticking out of the top. It obviously wasn’t the enormous tower or the 68040 powered speed demon I was searching for, but a free Mac is a free Mac. He returned to the door with an ImageWriter II and a desktop storage case with a bunch of 3.5” floppy disks. I thanked him kindly and took my new toys to my van.
Upon further inspection of my new finds, I found my new Mac to be an SE with 1 MB of RAM and a 20 MB hard drive. It and it’s accompanying keyboard and mouse were slightly yellowed, but I’ve come to expect that.
The Imagewriter came with the printer cable, a ribbon, and a piece of paper jammed into it. I unjammed the printer and powered it on. No error lights were lit up, they were all green.
The SE started up quickly to a relatively clean System 4 desktop. The mouse didn’t like to be tethered through the keyboard, but when I plugged each of them into their own ADB port, everything worked fine. Waiting in the box of disks were Aldus Pagemaker, HyperCard, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft File.
I smoothed the old single piece of paper out as best I could, spun the printer ribbon around a few times and opened up Microsoft Word on the SE. I wrote the word test and tried my test print. After a few seconds, the printer ground to life and spat out the crinkled page with the faded word test in the upper left corner. Success!
I used my MacBook and Power Mac 6100/66 to copy a set of System 6.0.8 disks and got to updating to the venerable System 6. I had to first download the disk images from the Apple site and rip them onto a CD, and then make bootable floppy images on the 6100. After it was complete, my son and I played a few games I had for the old girl, namely Dark Castle and Shuttlepuck Cafe.
When my wife arrived home from her shopping trip, I attempted to have a ‘”power on” race with her new Asus laptop loaded with Windows 8.1. I shut down my SE, flipped the switch off and then back on. I was greeted to nearly complete silence as the over 25-year-old 20 MB SCSI drive spun down and failed to spin back up.
I popped in Disk 2 of System 6.0.8, as this has a bootable System Folder and the hard drive utility. It couldn’t find anything on the SCSI bus. After multiple reboots that all resulted in the image of a floppy disk with a question mark on it, I flipped its power button to the off position and left it alone. Of course, my wife blames herself and her “negative tech juju”, but the truth is she didn’t kill my hard drive with her negativity. It had more than likely developed a case of stiction. This is where the lubrication the helps the head move across the hard drive platters becomes thicker, and it can actually cause the head to stick to the platter and render it inoperable.
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My little SE works just fine from the floppy drive. I don’t have an external floppy, and it’s extremely annoying flipping those in and out all the time to try to use it. Since I don’t have one of the longer T15 screw drivers to open up the case, this is where the story ends for now.
The Mac Experience
On the next installment of the SE Experience, I will document the hard drive replacement, solder joint inspection, and memory upgrade.
Keywords: #macse #macintoshse #macpackrat
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