ok, now I'm really gettin my sherlock holmes on. after our conversation about 'how do you get the case off?' I went and took my own advice tonight, and thanks to keeping other's woes in mind, I avoided the breakage shoals you get wrecked on, and successfully navigated my way to popping the front tabs of my 6360, taking down the front panel. then I navigated getting the sides off, which took some good old fashioned pounding, to loosen any sticking that i thought the plastic tabs might have settled into, since this thing was assembled at the factory maybe 6 years back--and sure enough, the sides came unstuck finally. one good well placed shove brought them forward in their slots to where i could lift them away from the housing. one side hung up at first, the ohther behaved better, and i almost got into a spot where I thought the top and side were going to break off together. I see how you get into these straits, man. this thing is too fragile and too stubborn at the same time.
experience cued me to slow down and take another breath and decompress and wait till I was calm again before i went on. as someone once advised me, 'if ya wanna go fast, go slow'. side two finally behaved and slipped as hoped, came out, and then the top needed some careful wiggling and cussing before it too let go and obeyed my orders to come out with its hands up. examined the input devices carefully, poked, pressed, studied, and finally removed one metal panel beneath the floppie drive and set it with its screw to the side. that let me get at the floppie drive. shined a flashlight deep into the spaces before trying anything. finally conclued that the ribbon cable was blocking my access, so i noted whichway the red stripe connected, and then wiggled it off. drew the floppie drive out, and discovered that whoever last put that in was careless. the ribbon cable was all runched up where it should have been smoothed and straight. ! why do these people do this? augh! [ and i say this as the daughter of an electronics engineer, who never taught me thing One about his craft, in 50 years, mind you. this is all ME] so once i slid the floppie drive out,I straightened out the turns and folds in the ribbon cable freed that on principle, to give me more slack. then studied the cd rom drive for a good long time and couldn't determine if or how it was suposed to come out. there's a snap plastic tab or tongue on its bottom that i can see is snapped down into a slot on the metal housing below it, but squeezing it didn't create enough freedom to let it move and come out at all. decided it was time to take off the back and pull out the drawer again. took those panels off again, laid the screws in a little box, set them to the other side, pulled the drawer out, went and got the cache and ram modules from that 8200/8500 that the guy left me, and darn! they don't fit on this board. the pin spacing doesn't match. crap. well that's one hope dashed. ok, back int the antistatic bags they go, for another day. the reason i did this, is because i am perplexed with a mystery. last night i booted this machine for the first time, and it didnt appear to have a hard drive. it comes back with a single icon in the middle of the grey screen that looks like a floppie disk, with a big question mark on it, blinking. it's asking me "hey boss! I looked everywhere! I can't find the tools! they aren't where they're supposed to be! where am I supposed to boot from? what am I supposed to use for an OS? Where do you want me to look? Do you know??" I reach for the system cd, open the drawer of the reader, drop it in and the mac looks at it and sees there's a system folder for it there, and away it goes. it's happy. it chimes. it smiles. and loads, and there's the familiar opening screen I was waiting for. exept no hard drive symbol. now this is a perplexion. because my brother in law called back tonight and said he never took out the drive. he just used it for 5 years, unplugged it and put the whole thing away in the closet as-is, and then handed it to me on thanksgiving. so tonight I took the case apart as far as i could navigate to--and yep--theres a hard drive in there, allright. once i got the floppie reader out, there it was, right underneath it. but i couldn't get any closer than that. not from the front, not from the back. tho i DO see thru the side vents that the idiots who threw this together at assembly in the factory crammed the ribbon cables in willy nilly along the sides of it, such that the cooling vents that are SUPPOSED to flow over the hard drive are half obstructed. oh yeah, people, thats REAL gooood thinking, there:: yeah! let's crimp the ribbon cables so the wires fail sooner, and while we're at it, lets compromise the cooling of the hard drive by obstructing the air vents with wadded up ribbon cabling. that way, we can force the customer to come to us sooner, to buy more parts, to fix their machines and we stay in business!!!! oooh! thump to the head!!! in fact, two thumps! to two heads!: one to the assemblers, for being so sloppy, and one to Apple, for designing this housing so confoundingly! so I couldn't get to the drive to see if there's a problem with the connections, and I couldn't get to the ribbon cables to straighten them out and clear the air path to the drive, and if I can't do either of those, I sure as hell can't put in a new drive if i buy one at the PC fair tomorrow!!!!! can anyone remember how you got the one out of yours? think back.I need some real tips here. did you take apart the metal housing also? I tired to start down that road and backed off. I took the two screws off the top back, thinking maybe I could wiggle all those metal slot tabs loose and disassemble the metal structure, but the first foray didn't yeild any encouraging signs of loosening anything, so I decided to backtrack and not go there.replaced those 2 screws and turned elsewhere. I have pretty good instincts and luck when it comes to taking things apart and putting them back together, but this one I'm being real conservative about. great. so it has a hard drive, but the machine can't 'see it, tho I can-- but I can't get to it. wonderful. and the last owner said it was working when he unplugged it last. ????????????????????????????? I sat and thought it thru, for a while, after I reassembled everything, and i reasoned: IF it had something to do with not slipping the mother board drawer back into the FoxComm contact row correctly, then I assume the cd rom reader wouldn't have worked either-- because it also relies on those contacts for its power and comunication with the motherboard bus. since the machine booted happily from the cd rom with the system software on it, that can't be it. I haven't tried putting a floppie in and seeing if can read something off a floppie while it has the system cd to use for an operating system, yet. i suppose that test would determine that the sector of the FoxComm contact row from the floppie reader is perfectly allright too... and i didn't see any visible problem along that contact row on the motherboard, nor in the slot of pins deep inside the machine where it wedges in, when the drawer is slid back in and established. I ran that tiny bottle brush cleaner along that slot to be sure there werent any dust specks down there that could be compromising contact there. the drawer slid back in nice and solid when i replaced it, tho I had to wiggle it a little till i got good satisfying seating and felt it go in right. screws didnt fight me upon cuing up the holes and turning them, so it was straight and rightly aligned. and when i got it all back together, reconnected the monitor and power and keyboard, it booted again just like last night: flashing floppie icon, put in system cd , loaded, happy mac, and no hard drive icon. the finder didnt locate one. i typed the last owner's name into the finder, and all it found was AOL. and all those files were locked. not that i care, they are on the cd for convenient signing up with AOL. so why the hell can't this machine sense its hard drive? what could have possibly happened between the time the last owner unplugged it and i got it home and plugged it in? and how the hell do I get to where I can get the hard drive out of the machine, either to check it over, or to put a new one in???? janet http://community.webtv.net/mensabrains/BADCODE -- PCI-PowerMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... 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