Macintosh SE 30 troubleshooting

[Ih8reno]

Hi all

I picked up an se 30 today at a great deal. Took it home it booted then had some error and froze. Knowing the batteries in these old Macs lead I opened it up and removed what was the original battery and replaced the motherboard back in the machine. Now the Mac shows garbles images all over it and the hdd spins but the light indicator doesn’t come on. I checked and rechecked all the connections and it’s all good. Any ideas?

 

[chabig]

Maybe it's just a loose connector. Start by reseating all of the cables you detached.

 

[jerwin]

I'll confess that I have no experience in the matter, but googling around suggests it's a
"Simasimac screen".

http://www.toughdev.com/content/2017/01/repairing-a-vintage-macintosh-se30/

http://lowendmac.com/brierley/09pb/simasimac.html

 

[MacTech68]

jerwin is correct.

You need to remove all the small, surface mount caps, clean the leaked electrolyte from the board, possibly repair etched/broken tracks and replace the caps with my personal preference of surface mount tantalum capacitors. Not an easy task at all. Surface mounted tantalum caps come in different sizes and only certain sizes will match the solder pads that are there. The electrolyte that leaks leaves what looks like a wetted area around them. This stuff corrodes the copper tracks (often leaving them a black color). It will do the same to tracks under ICS and IC legs.

Early in the failure of these caps, you can leave the machine running to warm it up and the caps will begin to work. A simple reset of the Mac (or power off then power on again) will usually get the machine to work, but if you leave it in this condition it will get worse as the tracks get eaten and the caps fail completely.