thanks for the advice. i will see if i can track down the service manuals.

many of the compacts are broken in some way.

i got the se/30 with a broken hard drive. i replaced it with one known to be good but i can't get it to recognise the hard drive.

after the replacement the floppy drive started to give me trouble as well. it auto-ejects and injects continuesly and seems to think there is an unformatted write protected floppy in there. i can get it running fine with an external zip drive. but the hard drive and floppy drive don't work.

i also have a SE FDHD that works fine

a regular se gutted for parts

an ED with the floppy drive from my se (floppy still doesn't work after the replacement) that had screen problems that i did manage to fix.

and also i'm bidding on a plus that should work but comes without a cable for the keyboard.

and i have a pb100 with a broken hard drive, dead battery and what i think is a dodgy connection for the plug for mains power.

all in all plenty of work.