Hardware thoughts on performa 630CD

Allan,

Simple answer - come by and pick up five or ten from me! Seriously, though, does the tray open and close? Do you have an external sled (or did they shift to an IDE CD drive in that model? Either way, an external SCSI CD rom would help with diagnostics. Have a dozen of those, too.

Jim

" I've already put 8 bucks into it, and that's way over what I had planned to spend in the 1st place."

If you spent $8 on a new battery, then disregard the following suggestion. If not, pull the motherboard and inspect for damage from a leaking battery. I've seen how those 4.5-volt alkaline batteries eventually leak and ruin motherboards and corrode the surrounding steel, after being left installed for months or years. It's a Rayovac 870 or 871, and is secured to the motherboard with velcro.

The Matshita 600i CD-ROM drive is a 4x SCSI device, but the hard drive is an IDE device. As for the CD that you burned, it has to be a CD-R and not a CD-RW disk. Additionally, it must be formatted as a Mac OS Standard (HFS) volume, and not a Mac OS Extended (HFS+) volume, or it can't be recognized under OS 7.6 For compatibility with slow CD-ROM drives, most users have had better luck when burning the disk at a slower speed, even if the CD-RW drive can handle faster burns.

The harsh reality is that beige G3s can be purchased from thrift stores for $25, so investing any money in a 68K Mac is questionable at this point. With 1 MB of dedicated DRAM for video support, no PCI slot, and small-capacity hard drive, the 630CD is really a deadend computer with limited upgrade options.

Alan
Although the HDD in the 630s is IDE, unless the Mac has been gently hacked, the CD-ROM (a 600i) should be SCSI. Have you a SCSI anything with which to check the SCSI bus? After checking the integrity of internal (logic) cabling and the drive's jumpers, that is. FDDs—in which the lubricant can congeal—excepted, most peripheral devices do not usually fail through disuse. Perhaps the inactivity of the Zip is indicative of general SCSI malaise, or even absent-mindedness on the part of PRAM. How's the backup battery?

Your CD-ROM, if functional, may be confused if the newly-burnt CD is not CD-R and HFS (not HFS+) formatted.

Certainly a CS ethernet card will allow the Mac not to live in Coventry, even if it lives in the garage. Here eBay can be your friend. (USD10-20, depending on impulse.) Since the 630 uses a 4.5-V alkaline backup battery, unless that was your eight-dollar outlay, replacing that will be a Good Thing. Even if you can use a network time server hereafter, a healthy PRAM in a healthy body is something to aim for.


Apple IIe; 15 x 68K; 7 x PPC; 5 x G3 System 6.0.8 to OS 10.4.x

Web surfing on a 630 would have to be text-only browsing, as the WWW has become too graphics intensive for an old Mac with 1 MB of DRAM for video. You could probably replace a water pump, waiting for the screen to refresh. Many users like to post results of success, after setting up an older Mac for internet use. I've gotten past whatever gratification that provides, and leave the web surfing to the better-equipped vehicles. The iMac 233 would be a much better choice, and more compact for the garage. As for the 630's CD-ROM drive troubles, can it read/mount any of the old CDs that you have for it? I never use Apple's "Disk Burner" for creating CDs, but I seem to recall an inability to choose the HFS (Mac OS Standard) format, for burning disks to be used in older, pre-OS 8.1 Macs. I prefer Roxio's "Toast" program, because it has more options.

A.J. Jones,

My appologies. Smehow I mistook you for Lewiston Allan. He lives close enough that he could swing by my place on the way to Spokane and have as much stuff as he wanted. There was another Allan that caused the need for a distinction between Lewiston Idaho Allan and someone in another town.

Lew. Allan is also close enough to go to the Washington State University auction. An $8.00 budget will buy you a G3 DT, 10 laser printers and a dozen keyboards. A mouse on the otherhand is a budget buster at $5.00. Highschool kids here love my leftovers for LAN parties.

Find yourself some university nearby and volunteer to save some old macs from the landfill. Enjoy the old stuff while you can. I still use my Quadra 700 for all my real estate work. I need the appletalk enabled imagewriter II for government forms so old school still rules.

Jim

BTW, As for the zip idsk, sometimes. if you are lucky, you can rebuild the desktop on a zip disk and eliminate the chatter of death. Changing a zip disk from a Mac with a newer OS to an Older OS will cause it to mess up the directory and make the disk unreadable or take forever to chatter and then load, if you are lucky.

Jim

If "Allan Jones is a popular name", how come I have so much trouble getting the spelling of "Allan" that my parents preferred. The hospital even got it wrong on my birth records and Mom had to get them to redo the birth certificate when she later found out.

I also got the nickname "AJ" after a 6-week university field course in the wilds of WA state where, in a group of 13 people, we had Allan Jones, Alan Huckaby, and Cecil Jones. The prof got so tired of getting the wrong student's attention that he ordered that nicknames be liberally applied, We became "AJ," "Huck," and "Scooter."

I see you registered in 2001 like I did.

the other AJ

Hi AJ,
Don't give up quite yet. The 630 is a decent machine. (The Performa 6300 is the machine that you read about being a "road apple." Actually, I have one of those and it's not that bad.)

A few things I'm not clear on: Does the CD drive get power to open and close? I believe you said it did in a previous post, but do both of the drives do the same thing?

Have you tried a commercial CD, if you have any? Even an audio CD would be a good way to test the functionality of the drive.

When you insert a CD into the performa, does anything appear on the display? Perhaps a box saying "This disc is not readable by this Macintosh"? Do you hear the CD spin up in the drive?

If you can hear the drive spinning, but nothing happens on the computer, it could be a software problem. Open the System Folder and then the Extensions folder. Make sure the Apple CD-ROM extension is present. You could also verify this by going to the Extensions Manager control panel (Apple Menu> Control Panels> Extensions Manager). Make sure there is a check next to the extensions relating to the CD ROM drive. You could also try choosing "Mac OS 7.6 All" from the drop-down menu at the top.

If you happen to have the original CDs that came with the computer, or any bootable CD (norton utilities, etc), try booting form one of them. Insert the CD, and restart the computer with the C key held down. If it boots from the CD, then you have a functioning Cd drive, but something isn't right with your system folder.

As far as browsing goes, it is possible, but its not the best experience in the world. There are other machines that would be faster, but there's nothing wrong with using a 68k for browsing. And, without Flash and related plugins, you won't be annoyed by quite as many ads 😉

Hope that helps some.
Kyle-

Kyle,

When my son saw the difference between web browsing on a Quadra 700 and the IIci, there was no going back. The quad is respectable on text based websites. Unfortunately, with the abundance of newer, faster, more affordable discarded machines, it is hard to go back in time except for nostagia.

Now that AJ's clone has joined in, I will repeat my offer. Allan with a Llama, you can have all the 630s you want. : ) lol

Jim