Mac SE Restoration

Years ago someone gave me a Macintosh SE, 20MB SCSI HDD, with 1MB of RAM. I had it sitting in storage and decided it could use some new life; this involved what I found out to be repairing, upgrading, and getting parts for the little machine. Then I was able to come up with a modern way to transfer files to it, so I can get software off the web, then get it onto the system without too much hassle, but that is getting ahead of myself.

Cleaning/Repairs

Last time I used the machine I remember it working, but then when I went to turn it on the system gave a sad mac with an error. In looking it up, http://www.midiguy.com/MGuy/MacQs/SadMac.html#anchorSE&II, I was told it was a RAM error. Power cycling the machine would periodically change the error, and once in a while get the machine to power up.

Getting the case off needs a special long screw driver, which I happen to have. The back only has 4 screws and then lifts off. Any repairs to these systems have to be done with a lot of care since there is a high voltage CRT. Very carefully I removed the cables from the motherboard, and then removed the motherboard itself.

After I removed the case and looked at the RAM, it was fairly oxidized. I happened to have a can of deoxite, I removed and cleaned all the ram and then the DIMMs. After, what I will say was jankily setting up the motherboard, it booted the first time. I did notice one of the legs on the the little slots didnt look at good as the rest, but it seems to work fine now.

Luckily for me the 20MB, 3.5″ SCSI drive still works fine. I ran diagnostics on it and them came back clean. I wanted to be able to download files from a more modern system by I will do a different post about that.

There were 2 more upgrades I wanted for this machine; first the original 1987 PRAM battery was still on the board. Fortunately it had not leaked at all, but I still want to remove it. I purchased a new 1/2AA, 3.6V battery holder and thought I could use the expansion slot in the back to hold it. I am not using the slot, and that way when the system goes into storage I can pop the battery out easily. I had recently gotten a new 3D printer (Ender v3 Pro), and made a mounting bracket. It needed to be mounted on the inside of the bracket because of the high of the battery holder, but it works well!

The last upgrade I wanted was some sort of mass storage. (Mass storage being anything over a floppy with a few MB) I do have a second Macintosh, I think its a Classic but I need to go get it. Someone gave me a Zip 100MB external SCSI drive, but to get that working you need at least Mac OS 6, with the driver installed. The Mac also only has a 800KB floppy drive, making it hard to transfer files to. I have a USB floppy drive, but these newer USB drives are fairly locked to 1.44MB floppies, as well as I couldnt easily read the file format for it.

Enter the SCSI2SD (v5.5 Pocket Edition)! I got it on ebay from https://www.ebay.com/itm/SCSI2SD-V5-5-Pocket-Edition/193496539667, I don’t know the seller, but the item is great. It allows you to write a disk image you make with Mini vMac or Basilisk II onto a micro SD card, then boot the Macintosh from it! Boom solid state drive for your Macintosh. This also allows you to kickstart the process of getting an OS and software you need to hook the Macintosh up to something more modern. There are different models of these SCSI2SD adapters and different versions. Apparently v6 is faster for some systems version of SCSI. My main feature I wanted was a DB-25 connector directly on it, since a lot of these adapters come with an internal header, and I wanted this to be able to go between Macs.

In researching I found this blog, https://www.savagetaylor.com/2018/01/05/setting-up-your-vintage-classic-68k-macintosh-using-a-scsi2sd-adapter/ it has a great guide on how to setup the device and even images to get you going! (I backed up a lot of the files related to the adapter on archive.org if years later anyone needs them) I’ll skip over that since that blog covers it so well. The device allows multiple SCSI device emulation. Note, if you have a Macintosh like mine that has an internal HDD, that is SCSI ID 0, so make your device 1 or later. When booting the Macintosh you can hold Command-Option-Shift-Delete-# to boot to that device. With this setup I was able to transfer an OS install onto the ZIP disk (at 100MB plenty of space), and update the internal system.

I installed Mac OS 6.0.8, later editions need more than 1MB of RAM. For anyone with a similar system I would suggest running in Finder mode, and not Multifinder. Multifinder kept running low on RAM when trying to run applications. At this point the system is up and running, reliably, and I was able to put some games on it. I will have another article about using our old reliable Kermit to transfer files to the Mac!