So yesterday I had a couple of hours of free time and I decided I would give this poor boy some attention.
As of now I've replaced both the internal hard drive and the floppy drive with later models and they're working perfectly fine!
The internal hard drive has been replaced with the 4.5GB drive I was mentioning earlier and it's been working with zero issues, it fits very nicely in the case and I've even been able to connect it to the orange activity led to keep everything as stock as possible.
The floppy drive instead has been replaced with a later 1.4 MB coming from a Power Macintosh and it seems to be humming along perfectly: it's quiet, it works beautifully, it fits the case just as fine as the original and it's fully supported by the Mac since it's an FDHD model.
There are still a couple of problems that bug me and that I haven't been able to fix yet, and they may very well come down to the power supply aging caps.
The oddest one is related to RAM: I've put 4 1MB, 70ms banks on the logic board, switched the appropriate jumper to 2/4MB support but the OS only sees 2MB out of 4.
The modules themselves are known to be working, since they've been taken from my IIsi which has used them for a long time with zero issues - I've already tried reseating them, but with no luck. I should mention they are probably some high-density SIMMs, since they sport only 3 chips on them and are very compact: I also have a couple of old goldstar SIMMs which are definitely heavier and with a lot more chips on them, summing up to the same 1MB. Is there some known incompatibility between particular types of 30-pin SIMMs and the Macintosh SE?
The second one is probably due to some instability in the 5V supply: I've used the Mac for a while to test everything was running fine and I've noticed that after a few minutes it just hangs in various ways.
The first time it bombed with a somewhat flashing dialog box and I couldn't moved the mouse to click the "reset" button; the second time instead, it just froze in the middle of nothing.
Otherwise the system is running fine and I've already ruled out the hard drive and the RAM, since they're both known to be ok. The logic board seems fine too, no leakage whatsoever.
I'll probably buy a replacement battery for my voltmeter so that I can do some proper measurements from the floppy port and see what's going on.
Meanwhile, I've now got two floppy drives that don't work anymore.
Both of them were completely full of dust in a way that I couldn't have imagined, so I carefully cleaned it with a small brush avoiding to get in contact with the head of the drive.
The first drive just makes a horrible noise (with no disk inserted) which seems to come from the head motor: the head itself doesn't move though and the motor worm doesn't seem to spin. There's also something that prevents the disk from being inserted after a certain point and I'm not really sure what that might be.
The second drive used to work just fine before cleaning (sigh), but now when I insert the floppy it just stays there - the drive motor doesn't spin and it doesn't even attempt to read the floppy, instead it just ejects the media after a couple of seconds.
I'm no expert when it comes to repairing floppy drives so I'll probably leave this up to ferrix too, but I'm just curious about what might be going on here. Any thoughts?
As of now I've replaced both the internal hard drive and the floppy drive with later models and they're working perfectly fine!
The internal hard drive has been replaced with the 4.5GB drive I was mentioning earlier and it's been working with zero issues, it fits very nicely in the case and I've even been able to connect it to the orange activity led to keep everything as stock as possible.
The floppy drive instead has been replaced with a later 1.4 MB coming from a Power Macintosh and it seems to be humming along perfectly: it's quiet, it works beautifully, it fits the case just as fine as the original and it's fully supported by the Mac since it's an FDHD model.
There are still a couple of problems that bug me and that I haven't been able to fix yet, and they may very well come down to the power supply aging caps.
The oddest one is related to RAM: I've put 4 1MB, 70ms banks on the logic board, switched the appropriate jumper to 2/4MB support but the OS only sees 2MB out of 4.
The modules themselves are known to be working, since they've been taken from my IIsi which has used them for a long time with zero issues - I've already tried reseating them, but with no luck. I should mention they are probably some high-density SIMMs, since they sport only 3 chips on them and are very compact: I also have a couple of old goldstar SIMMs which are definitely heavier and with a lot more chips on them, summing up to the same 1MB. Is there some known incompatibility between particular types of 30-pin SIMMs and the Macintosh SE?
The second one is probably due to some instability in the 5V supply: I've used the Mac for a while to test everything was running fine and I've noticed that after a few minutes it just hangs in various ways.
The first time it bombed with a somewhat flashing dialog box and I couldn't moved the mouse to click the "reset" button; the second time instead, it just froze in the middle of nothing.
Otherwise the system is running fine and I've already ruled out the hard drive and the RAM, since they're both known to be ok. The logic board seems fine too, no leakage whatsoever.
I'll probably buy a replacement battery for my voltmeter so that I can do some proper measurements from the floppy port and see what's going on.
Meanwhile, I've now got two floppy drives that don't work anymore.
Both of them were completely full of dust in a way that I couldn't have imagined, so I carefully cleaned it with a small brush avoiding to get in contact with the head of the drive.
The first drive just makes a horrible noise (with no disk inserted) which seems to come from the head motor: the head itself doesn't move though and the motor worm doesn't seem to spin. There's also something that prevents the disk from being inserted after a certain point and I'm not really sure what that might be.
The second drive used to work just fine before cleaning (sigh), but now when I insert the floppy it just stays there - the drive motor doesn't spin and it doesn't even attempt to read the floppy, instead it just ejects the media after a couple of seconds.
I'm no expert when it comes to repairing floppy drives so I'll probably leave this up to ferrix too, but I'm just curious about what might be going on here. Any thoughts?