Time to talk about one of my pieces of junk.
I have one of these, minus the FDHD- mine is stuck with the 800k floppy. But it has a 20 MB internal SCSI hard drive, that STILL WORKS. Also, it came with an external 30 MB hard drive, that STILL WORKS... but is living on borrowed time. The external drive's bearings are starting to take a shit.
This machine came from an old co-worker, who donated it to me before he retired.
The floppy disk drive had a disk stuck inside. There is no eject button to retrieve the disk, but there is a little paperclip hole you can use to push the disk out manually. The reason the eject mechanism no longer worked is that there is this tiny plastic gear that drives the eject mechanism, whose teeth were just completely destroyed. Apparently, this is common; almost all mini-mac's need this repair. Luckily, there's a dude who 3D-prints new gears for these disk drives: . Purchased a few of these gears and replaced the broken one. Re-lubricated the moving parts with white lithium grease. Gave the heads a thorough cleaning. This was all about 4 years ago, the disk drive is still working well today.
Installed a modern SCSI to SD card reader, went from 50 MB to 8 GB of storage in 8 1 GB partitions.
Tried to install a Falleron EN ethernet card, but could not get the fucker to be recognized by the software. Usually, I'd bust out the voltmeter and the logic analyzer to figure out what's going on with it, but this Mac machine is such a pain in the dick to work on due to its form factor. There is literally no way you can get to the card when the machine is assembled without it's cover. Perhaps one day I'll figure out a way to run the machine with it's motherboard exposed.
These Mac's sure are an exercise in frustration. Due to the structure of that old file system, you can't just copy files from a PC (NTFS or FAT or anything else really) to the Macintosh, and expect it to work. It is a painful process to move programs onto it and actually run them. It usually involves using MiniVMac emulator to open "Stuffit" archives (if they aren't corrupted or made with a newer unsupported version), making disk images out of them, and finally sending that disk image over serial or ethernet to my Apple IIGS which can actually write Macintosh HFS disks. Oh yeah, your old PC can't write Apple/Mac floppies, because Apple/Mac floppy drives use a variable speed write to get extra space on a floppy disk (800k vs 720k).
Last thing to say about this particular machine is that it either seems to have a hardware/memory related issue, or I'm missing something I haven't learned yet. So much software bombs-out with memory errors when it tries to run. Still haven't figured this one out yet. One of these days I'll run some diagnostic software.
e: unnecessary apostrophe e2: Mac variable disk drive speed e3: Decided to do something about that RAM problem today. Disassembled the bastard and used contact cleaner on the sockets and SIMM pins. Re-checked the solder pad jumper settings for RAM size. Put it all back together, still being a bastard. Last time I tried to get RAM for this thing years ago, it was quite difficult to come across due to stupid idiosyncrasies regarding the type of memory. Just found out there's dudes making refurbished and tested 30 pin SIMMs specifically for Mac SE machines. $40. Picking up 4 1mb sticks. Probably not going to fix my problem, but still nice to have spares.
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