My thifty ebay Mac SE purchased arrived recently and I finally found time to unpack it and power it up. I knew from the original auction description that it had an issue of booting to a flashing question mark. I figured that in the best case scenario I’d just have to reinstall the System software on it.
I wasn’t that lucky, unfortunately. When I power it on it sounds like the internal HD is stuck in a constant effort to read the drive and not finding any success. I will post a sound file so you can hear it. After reading the troubleshooting information at Chris Adams’ SE Support pages it fits the description of drive “stiction” – a term I remember knowing many years ago.
The good news, however, is that the floppy drive works fine and I was able to boot the machine from an old 800k Norton Utilities Emergency Disk and from an older Apple Disk Tools floppy. Neither HDSC Setup, Disk First Aid, or Norton Disk Doctor were able to see or mount the internal HD, although the drive activity indicator on the front of the SE flashes.
So it looks like step 1 will be to replace the internal SCSI hard drive. Step 2 is going to be upgrading the RAM. I have not yet confirmed, but suspect that the RAM is only 1 MB since when I tried to boot from a System 7.5 Disk Tools floppy I got a dialog box that simply said “System 7.5 needs more memory” with no other option but to shut down.
I consulted the Adding RAM section of Chris’ SE Support site and after skimming the instructions discovered that it’s not just a matter of replacing four 256MB SIMMs with four 1 MB modules in the RAM slots. You also have to clip a resistor so that computer knows about the change in memory configuration. That should make things more interesting!
