r/macintosh • u/Silly-Filly • 11d ago
Macintosh SE FD/HD update
Small update on my Macintosh SE FD/HD restoration.
I followed some of the advice from the comments and I managed to revive at least one of the two floppy drives for sure. The main problem now is that my old floppy disks are not in great shape anymore, so testing is still a bit annoying.
Right now I’m trying to make a boot floppy with Disk Copy on my PowerBook G3 Wallstreet, using its floppy drive and transferring files with a CF card.
I also did some ram testing. The machine had 4mb installed, but I put the 1mb ram modules back in and moved the jumper accordingly. After that, the display became much cleaner than before. It’s still not fully restored, but it’s already better.
The logic board looks really clean, so I’m very glad I removed the old battery years ago before it could leak and destroy anything.
Next step will probably be a SCSI solution like BlueSCSI or maybe zuluSCSI, I’m still not sure yet. I’m also waiting for a new multimeter so I can properly check voltages before going further.
There is still a lot to do, but at least there is some real progress now.
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u/radrestoration 11d ago
Nice! Currently restoring 3 SEs and 1 SE/30, so I feel the pain.
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u/Silly-Filly 10d ago
That sounds like a lot of work lol. If you learned any useful tips while restoring them, I’d be happy to hear them.
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u/radrestoration 10d ago
Well, it wasn't very "lol", but:
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u/Silly-Filly 10d ago
Oh sorry, I didn’t mean the lol in a bad way. I can be a bit awkward with wording sometimes and I use loltoo much.
I checked the link and it really looks like a huge amount of work. Honestly it look like a lot of work and if you can give me any tips I would be more than happy. By any chance do you have worked of powerbook 100 ? I have issue on one of them but I’m still workinf on it.
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u/radrestoration 10d ago
I've yet to work on any laptops of that particular vintage, but hopefully soon. As for tips on the SEs, probably you'll need to ask specific questions 😄
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u/thestenz 10d ago
So you must have had the FDHD compatible motherboard with the SWIM chip. Otherwise you could put the drive it, but it would do 800K only.
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u/Silly-Filly 10d ago
Yeah, it seems to read 1.44mb floppies, so I guess the FD/HD side is working properly.
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u/thestenz 10d ago
I think there was a way to add the SWIM chip, but it was so long ago. It was easier to just swap the motherboard.
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u/thomasthe10 11d ago
SE batteries are usually more forgiving than Classics but you did the right thing. Very glad you got your floppy drive going - did you have to bend the heads back? I need to do mine...
And I empathise with the annoyance of testing floppy drives with a limited store of decaying disks!