Hey,

Okay, for those of you who have read my post about a second Macintosh SE with a defective hard drive...

I had forgotten to mention this...that while I was running it from the floppy disk, I had to go downstairs to get something. When I got back up, the SE displayed a warning about an illegal action. And then I got a completely black screen, except for a sad mac in the center of the screen and a series of numbers, much like Superpantoufle's problem (except that mine's a black screen w/sad mac, and not black screen w/happy mac).

I didn't mention it at the time because I simply attributed it to the lack of a hard drive. But then I read Superpantoufle's post and the subsequent answers, about it maybe being a logic board problem. I had a look at the logic board, and there are no visible defects at all. I read what Superpantoufle's answerers said about RAM...do you think that just re-seating the RAM would do it?

Luckily, I saw several Miniscribe 20MB hard drives on the Web that seem to be what I'm looking for (I want the original 20-year-old hard drive, not some modern one). It's 50-pin, right?

I'm slightly mystified with all of this...is there a chance that a working HD and a RAM-re-seating will cure the black screen w/sad mac?

-Apostrophe