I upgraded the hard drive in my SE/30 with a SCSI2SD adapter nine months ago. It's been running perfectly since then.
![SD2USB_0041](sd2usb_0041.jpg)
The other day, I powered it on and was greeted with an error message. It didn't matter if I booted off the drive or with a floppy, I got the same bus error. As soon as it got to the Finder, it would throw up the error with only an option to reboot.
![SE30 recap_0063](se30-recap_0063.jpg)
The sound on this machine has always been very low; as in barely audible. You can't even hear the start up bong. I figured the caps were on the way out, but everything else worked, so not having sound never bothered me. Now with this random bus error, I figured it was finally time to recap the board.
![SE30 recap_0045](se30-recap_0045.jpg)
I hopped on Digikey and ordered a bunch of new caps.
![SE30 new caps_001](se30-new-caps_001.jpg)
With the aid of my trusty hot air rework station, I removed all the old caps from the board, being very careful not to lift any of the traces or pads.
![HARS_0012](hars_0012.jpg)
Old caps smell nasty when you heat them up. They have a fishy smell to them.
![SE30 recap_0047](se30-recap_0047.jpg)
I then cleaned off all the pads with some isopropyl alcohol to remove the grime.
![SE30 recap_0049](se30-recap_0049.jpg)
Some of the pads were really nasty.
![SE30 recap_0050](se30-recap_0050.jpg)
The alcohol did a nice job of cleaning them up.
![SE30 recap_0054](se30-recap_0054.jpg)
I then soldered all the new caps into place. I didn't bother to unsolder the leads from the two axial caps. I just cut the leads and then soldered the new ones to the old leads.
![SE30 recap_0055a](se30-recap_0055a.jpg)
Fingers crossed. First boot. Ugh! What is that?
![SE30 recap_0057](se30-recap_0057.jpg)
After a closer inspection, I found two caps that had a single lead that wasn't adequately soldered to the pad. I touched them up again and put the machine back together and popped in a floppy.
Success!
![SE30 recap_0062](se30-recap_0062-2.jpg)
I then reinstalled the hard drive and powered it back up. The Mac still booted up with the bus error. So it wasn't a failing logicboard due to leaky caps. Just to make sure it wasn't the hard drive, I threw it into another machine. That one booted up and gave me an "out of memory" error. What is going on?
![SE30 recap_0064](se30-recap_0064.jpg)
There must be something corrupt on the hard drive. I put the drive back into the SE/30, deleted the System folder, and reinstalled System 6.0.8. That did the trick. All is well.
![se30-recap-complete_001](se30-recap-complete_001.jpg)
So I probably didn't have to recap the Mac after all. Well, at least now I have sound!