donaghey@husc8.HARVARD.EDU (Thomas Donaghey) (07/30/90)
I bought a Mac SE two years ago, with an internal 20meg HD. Some time ago it went bad on me: refused to boot up and wouldn't show up on the desktop. I'm going to need a useable HD in the fall semester, so I suppose I'd better fix it. When the disk is down, the computer refuses to start booting at all--even off a floppy--for nearly half a minute. Two days ago the disk came back up with lots of whining. The next day as I was opening a folder it crashed and wouldn't reboot. I managed to coerce it into booting up the day after, but it made funny "bloop bloop" noises and, while booting up, the whine went up and down on a period of about eight seconds, with drive activity (noisy) only at the up end of the cycle. Took over a minute to boot up that way. When next I tried to boot up, the boot started, then the whine began to lower in pitch and eventually the drive cut out altogether--and the computer refused to boot at all--even off a floppy drive. I'm definitely going to need to take the computer in. My question: do folks think it's just the hard drive, or might the motherboard also be in difficul- ties? Does anyone know if the hard drive might be reparable? Just what am I getting into here? If anyone out there in netland knows anything about what might be wrong with the system, please post to me at donaghey%husc8@harvard.harvard.edu or whatever the address is at the top of this screen. I'd love some assistance or advice, but I don't know whether tying up the rn is such a good idea... Thanks in advance. Thomas Donaghey (donaghey%husc8@harvard.harvard.edu)