I managed to snag one of these complete with bag (with all four feet), modem and 4MB Ram card off the side of the road on garbage night a few years back. It used to power on with the AC adapter+9 volt battery trick, but it always displayed the sad mac on boot. Now it doesn't even turn on. Research says its usually bad capacitors on the motherboard, but does anyone know how to take this thing apart? Also, anyone got a working logic board kicking around?
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Dead Mac Portable (non-backlit), any repair suggestions?
- Thread starter njroadfan
- Start date
redhawk579
Experienced Member
this might be out of my juristiction but did you try using a legit power adapter ,the 9v might not have enough juice
I have the original power supply, the lead acid battery is toast like every other portable. Using the original AC adapter+ fresh 9 volt was enough to get the machine to post and display the sad mac, now its completely dead. Inside of the case shows a little bit of telltale brown fluid, likely electrolyte from leaking caps.
Machine is finally recapped and working. The original HD is toast, but boots fine from an external drive. Next up is sourcing a hard drive, cleaning/lubricating the floppy drive, and rebuilding the battery. Too bad it isn't a backlit model, that active matrix screen is really nice compared to the super twist display on my Powerbook 165.
RWallmow
Veteran Member
While it uses a proprietary cable, the hard drive was standard SCSI in protocol, I made an adapter cable when I had my Portable so I could install any 50-pin SCSI drive (that was the same or less power draw as the stock). It is not a hard process, its completely do-able, just time consuming carefully lining up all those wires. I probably had an hour into my cable, just because I had to re-do it once.
Here is a link to the adapter cable pinout: http://web.archive.org/web/20080705022723/http://www.antinode.org/mac/port_scsi.html
Lately I have been toying with the idea of trying to spin up a PCB design that would do this, a simple plug in adapter with a 34pin Mac Portable SCSI header, and a 50pin plug to hang right on the back of a typical SCSI drive. I would think it would be a simple project, probably a good one for me to start learning PCB design with ;-)
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smp
Veteran Member
WOAH! Please keep me in mind if you decide to go forward with this idea. I will definitely want to pick up a couple of those!
smp
RWallmow
Veteran Member
I just spun up a design that would hang off the back of a 50 pin SCSI drive, much like any other SCSI adapters would. A 34pin cable would go from motherboard to adapter, and there are solder holes for a molex power connector to hang off of.
Made with ExpressPCBEstimated costs for 3 prototypes would be $87 for JUST the PCBs, not including connectors or the 34pin cable. I could have these made, however I do not have a Portable anymore to do any testing, so all I could do would be offer them up to those here in need of a solution, under the terms that its untested and sold as-is. I could offer bare PCB or assembled for cost of materials only (parts would likely be from digikey since they are close by to me so cheap/fast shipping). Or if someone else wanted to take this over I can give you the ExpressPCB file, and you can run with it.