End of the road for my Color Classic???

Question

Greetings. Lifelong Mac user here who, in the wake of Jobs’ passing, retrieved my Color Classic from the attic, thinking it would surely boot right up. It worked as recently as maybe 4-5 years ago, but all attempts over the past month to successfully boot it up have been in vain. After one purchase from Radio Shack and three from eBay, I’m 99 percent done throwing any more money at it. But I’d like to see if any of you could maybe help me out before I give up the ghost. I don’t have long, since I’ll need to return the internal HD I just bought off eBay soon if I want a refund. Here’s the rundown:
** Initially, it would boot up without the startup chime, show a grey screen for a minute or two (no icons at all), then give the eight-tone chimes of death.
** Buying a new PRAM battery led to it giving the startup chime and showing the smiling Mac, but that would give way to the flashing question mark over the floppy icon. I tried resetting PRAM, which did lead to the three successive startup chimes, but still got the question mark afterward.
** Next thing I did was buy a complete set of 7.1 discs off eBay. Using either the Disk Tools disc or the Install Me First disc, I would get the startup chime and smiling Mac, but then I couldn’t get past this message: “This startup disk will not work with this Macintosh. Use the latest installer to update this disk for this model.” For some reason, the mouse wouldn’t work when doing this, so I’d have to power off with the main switch and then eject the floppy with a paper clip. I would later learn that these discs apparently wouldn’t work on the CC because of a missing System Enabler.
** Next step: buying 7.6 Disk Tools discs off eBay. This time, the startup chime and happy Mac gave way to a sad Mac icon, a "0000000F / 00000066" error message and four-tone chimes of death. That led me to believe my factory HD was bad, sooooo …
** I bought an internal HD off eBay with 7.5 already installed on it. I had high hopes that this would finally do the trick. The heavens would open up and I would see the desktop. But ... after the swap, I was greeted once again with the flashing question mark. I disconnected and reattached the data and power cables to the HD three times, but to no avail. I tried booting off the 7.6 Disk Tools with this new HD, but got the sad Mac / "0000000F / 00000066" sequence once more. I tried booting off the 7.6 Disk Tools with no HD attached and got the same thing. This was the most depressing night of all.
** Today, with the new HD installed, I tried booting off of old 7.0.1 and 7.1 startup floppies my dad made back in the day -- and one or both of them actually progresses past the smiling Mac to the "Welcome to Macintosh" screen. But then, the "use the latest installer" screen takes over.
So this is where things stand. I'm holding out hope that I can having a working CC without spending any more money, but I'm not optimistic. Tonight I might trying washing the logic board in the dishwasher, as well as booting with the logic board disconnected and then pushing it in shortly after the startup chime (which I had tried with the factory HD without success).
Any thoughts? Ideas? Or should I call it a day, put it back on the side mantle in my living room, and go the Macquarium (or MacAntFarm) route down the road? Thanks in advance for your help!

Answer 1

The Color Classic is pretty straight forward to work on because the motherboard is just a matter of pulling it out.
But I don't think it's a bad motherboard so that is the good news. Sounds like the original hard drive died but before you toss it try seeing if it is just a matter of the heads being stuck. Take it in hand and gently swish it back and forth a few times to see if it that will unstick the heads. If you had a clean room I would say open the drive and gently turn the platters than zip it back up and see if it will work.
The "new' hard drive you bought sounds like it is pooched as those clicking sounds are usually an indication of a bad drive so return it ASAP for a working one or a refund. But just in case if you look at your old hard drive does it have terminators on it, they will look like two long black strips with multiple prongs attaching them to the motherboard of the hard drive. Now look at the new one, does it have any or a place for them? Though my memory is foggy on SCSI drives but that 700 might have a jumper instead but that could be wrong.
In terms of the OS, you can run System 8 on it. But you must buy the Apple release version for all Macs which comes with a floppy disk to boot your CC as well as a CD with the system SW on it. The CD is white but you will need a SCSI CD drive to install the sw. The error messages tell me that those disks are the wrong ones and not something wrong with your CC.
Now if you were into experimenting..... the following motherboards from other compact Macs will work in your CC.
The motherboard from the LC 525 is a straight swap in and even the ports on the board mate up with the holes on the rear cover. The LC 550 as well, which was actually the motherboard that the CC II used.
The motherboard from the LC 575 will also work and that adds a 68040 cpu into the mix plus the upgrade to 72 pin simms which allows you to add up to 128mb of ram with a modification to the case of the CC. The two other boards I mentioned also take 72 pin simms so you can bump up your CC from 10mb to 32mb.
I wrote a short page on my experiments here, http://www.kevinomura.com/macs/colorclassic/index.html .
In any event I think it's just your hard drive that is the problem since your video sounds good, don't toss that CC as there are still collectors out there looking for them.
On other thought, since the hard drive is on a caddy with a zif socket it's possible that some of the pins have a bit of corrosion on them. Check the one's on the hard drive side and see if they look clean, if not clean them. on the computer side that will be tougher since it's deep in the case but a few insertions of the drive might be enough to knock some of the corrosion off and make a better contact.