Forums | MacLife

I got a Mac Classic last week, for free!

Not exactly a speed demon--68000 processor running at 8 MHz, 2 megs of RAM (1 MB soldered to the motherboard, 1 MB soldered to the expansion card), 40 MB hard drive.

When I first turned it on, I got a screen with verical stripes, which (from what I read) can be caused by leaky capacitors messing up the motherboard. So I opened it up, I pulled the motherboard & expansion card out, blew out dust, replaced the PRAM battery. checked for loose connections. I put it back together, turned it on and...same thing. But after a few tries I heard the startup bong and it came to life (has System 6.0.7 installed).

But then the  floppy drive acted as though there was a bad disk in the drive. I could hear it trying to "read" the disk that wasn't there. I got a dialog box saying the disk is unreadable, do I want to format or eject? Didn't matter what I did--clicked eject, clicked format, inserted a disk--it went through the same loop over and over. I zapped the PRAM, no improvement. So I shut down and disconnected the floppy drive. It worked fine when I started up again. I tried connecting a spare floppy drive I have, and had the same problem.

Could it be the floppy drive cable that's bad? Or a bad chip on the motherboard?

Some people actually recommend cleaning the motherboard in a diswasher as a cure to many Mac Classic woes. That would definitely be tried only a last resort!