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A Successful SE/30 Recap

November 18, 2017 Filed in: Vintage | Mac SE | Recap | Restoration
I upgraded the hard drive in my SE/30 with a SCSI2SD adapter nine months ago. It's been running perfectly since then.

SD2USB_0041

The other day, I powered it on and was greeted with an error message. It didn't matter if I booted off the drive or with a floppy, I got the same bus error. As soon as it got to the Finder, it would throw up the error with only an option to reboot.

SE30 recap_0063

The sound on this machine has always been very low; as in barely audible. You can't even hear the start up bong. I figured the caps were on the way out, but everything else worked, so not having sound never bothered me. Now with this random bus error, I figured it was finally time to recap the board.

SE30 recap_0045

I hopped on Digikey and ordered a bunch of new caps.

SE30 new caps_001

With the aid of my trusty hot air rework station, I removed all the old caps from the board, being very careful not to lift any of the traces or pads.

HARS_0012

Old caps smell nasty when you heat them up. They have a fishy smell to them.

SE30 recap_0047

I then cleaned off all the pads with some isopropyl alcohol to remove the grime.

SE30 recap_0049

Some of the pads were really nasty.

SE30 recap_0050

The alcohol did a nice job of cleaning them up.

SE30 recap_0054

I then soldered all the new caps into place. I didn't bother to unsolder the leads from the two axial caps. I just cut the leads and then soldered the new ones to the old leads.

SE30 recap_0055a

Fingers crossed. First boot. Ugh! What is that?

SE30 recap_0057

After a closer inspection, I found two caps that had a single lead that wasn't adequately soldered to the pad. I touched them up again and put the machine back together and popped in a floppy.

Success!

SE30 recap_0062

I then reinstalled the hard drive and powered it back up. The Mac still booted up with the bus error. So it wasn't a failing logicboard due to leaky caps. Just to make sure it wasn't the hard drive, I threw it into another machine. That one booted up and gave me an "out of memory" error. What is going on?

SE30 recap_0064

There must be something corrupt on the hard drive. I put the drive back into the SE/30, deleted the System folder, and reinstalled System 6.0.8. That did the trick. All is well.

se30-recap-complete_001

So I probably didn't have to recap the Mac after all. Well, at least now I have sound!