> As I understand it:
> *SE/30 - Your SE FDHD with a MC68030 processor instead of the MC68000.
The mainboard to the SE/30 is rather different, but the rest of
the hardware is interchangable. Most of the repair advice for the
SE applies to the SE/30 because of this.
> > 3) I have (literally) over 1,000 floppy disks.
A piece of advice: use DiskCopy to image everything. It will help
you to find defective diskettes and it will help you preserve your
software collection. A lot of my diskettes are starting to fail,
and failure rates vary by publisher (Microsoft is bad, Adobe is
about average, nothing from Aldus has failed). It just goes to
show who used quality media for their expensive software.
> > on any of the 40,000 Mac Pluses I have
It sounds like you can fulfill one of my aspirations: to build a
house using compact Macs as bricks. Not only would you be a step
ahead of those freakish science fiction guys who say there will be
computers in our walls[1], but lighting and heating will be integrated
into the walls.
[1] These guys also claim that computers will be woven into the
fabric of our clothes. I wouldn't suggest trying this with
compact Macs.
> > 5) I have a pair of Syquest 44 MB... "things"...
How big are the cartridges? The drives which I am familiar (about
3.5" cartridges) are usually refered to as removable media or
removable hard drives. Some of them are MO drives, but I think
some of them aren't. They are quite useful (faster and easier than
writable CDs), but the media was always quite expensive.
I suggest holding off on the removable media and external hard
drives until you have a functional system loaded with software
which can scan the SCSI bus (something like Mt. Everything will
allow you to mount these drives with its own drivers).
> > It will mount on the Classic II (haven't tried it on the thousands
> > of Classics) but not any of the Mac Pluses
Some people are disturbed when SCSI is refered to as a dark art,
but I will stand by that assertion. Seeming as the Plus doesn't
have internal hard drives, you probably have a termination issue.
The driver may have specific requirements (it is on an invisible
partition on the disk). You may also need to turn the drive on
early, to spin up (I've seen this problem on Apple's Apple II SCSI
controller, but never on the Macintosh).
> > My question is: I have heard horror stories about the innards of
> > these things. Is it safe to be poking around in there? What should
> > I and shouldn't I touch?
The answer to the first question is no. If you insist: the answer
to the second question is, nothing above the mainboard. If you
want to live dangerously: it is pretty safe as long as you respect
electricity. I usually leave the machine powered down for a day
(this is for pleasure, not work, so it can wait), go around ensuring
that dangerous components (the CRT and capacitors) are discharged,
and I always take the boot off the CRT (on the SE and SE/30). It
is to difficult to disconnect wires and work with the drives without
bumping into the boot, and bumping into the boot will break the
vaccum seal on the CRT. Also, the metal bracket behind the drives
should be removed (again, more stuff to get in the way).
Enjoy your finds. Didn't you say that a IIgs came with the batch.
If so, could you please tell me more about it (I guess this would
be off list). I'm a big fan of the II.
Byron.
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