At 12:56 -0500 12/21/09, Robert Esposito wrote - and I snipped: >It has a finicky >floppy drive. It does not quite complete taking in a disk. You have to >give it a final push with a probe/stick/paperclip. Ejecting is >sometimes incomplete. Paperclip works well on that.
Floppy drives need regular cleaning and lubrication. Compressed air or a small vacuum to get the dust out. Read-write heads wiped with something soft and some carbon tetrachloride (well, the dogooders have made that illegal, some dry alcohol is another option but don't leave a soap film.) A tiny drop of light oil - gun or sewing machine lubricant - where you can see metal parts sliding over one another. >I notice a white >line about 1/8 inch wide running from top left to lower right so I am >assuming those pixels are failing or gone. The screen on an SE/30 doesn't have pixels the way a color monitor does. It's just a coating of florescent material that glows when electrons hit it. The appearance of dots is entirely in the focused beam from the electron gun inside of the picture tube. The pixels are actually stored in the computer's memory rather than in some PCI or NuBus card of more recent Macs so I doubt if the white line is digital in nature. More likely there is some analog interference affecting the drive voltages on the picture tube. It could be external. Is the SE/30 sitting near another big monitor? Does the line move when you rotate the SE/30? It's also possible that the analog power board in the SE/30 is allowing too much 60 Hz line frequency voltage on the power pins. The analog board also has some adjustment controls on it that might need some twiddling. Do check out the warnings for high voltage on the picture tube that can stay around after the machine is turned off. It's not the 30,000 volts of a color tube but at a tenth of that it can still shake you up. > >Anyone got an idea for cleaning the floppy drive other than opening up >the SE30? > There are head-cleaning disks in captivity but I have never had much luck with them. The sticky ness you describe doesn't sound like dirty heads though. You will soon need to open the SE/30 up. The painful part is getting to the torx screws at the top side. They are buried inside of a tube in the cover so deeply that an ordinary wrench wont go that deep. Check the archives. Personally I never replace them once I get them out. There is an ordinary Allen wrench with a not too popular size in 32's of an inch that will fit well enough to remove the screws. You can test on the black screws near the bottom that use the same wrench. My personal tool is a torx tip made for use with a 1/4 inch hex socket handle. I silver soldered it onto a piece of steel rod that was once a plain old screwdriver. I run 7.5 on an SE/30 as a file server. An old Mac-II case, without a motherboard, keeps 4 SCSI disks spinning and an Asante ethernet card in the SE/30 connects to our local network. It came with us on a move to Colorado in 1991 and has been running ever since. Netpresenz from Stairways Software allows the SE/30 to talk to Linux and OS 10.4+. I prefer to keep my G4 at 10.3.9 which can talk to the SE/30 using native AppleTalk. -- --> From the U S of A, the only socialist country that refuses to admit it. <-- -- ----- You received this message because you are a member of the Vintage Macs group. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/vintagemacs.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To leave this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/vintage-macs Support for older Macs: http://lowendmac.com/services/
