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From: stevel@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Steve Ligett)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: SE/30 screen flickers/no it doesn't/yes it does/...
Message-ID: <1991Jun11.145958.15987@dartvax.dartmouth.edu>
Date: 11 Jun 91 14:59:58 GMT
References: <12163@skye.cs.ed.ac.uk> <14394@ur-cc.UUCP>
Sender: news@dartvax.dartmouth.edu (The News Manager)
Organization: Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
Lines: 42

In article <14394@ur-cc.UUCP> afry@uhura.cc.rochester.edu (Alan R. Fry) writes:
>In article <12163@skye.cs.ed.ac.uk:> nick@lfcs.ed.ac.uk writes:
>:>Any other SE/30 owners had the following problem? A sporadic flickering/jumping
>:>of the screen: the top and bottom few pixel rows of the screen suddenly
>:>stretch, and the stretched regions drift inward toward the centre and then
>:>out again.
>I had this very same problem when I installed a 105 meg quantum in my
>SE/30.  The disk access flickering was very reproducible in my case, and
>damn annoying.  I took it in to the idiot who installed it, and he
>'figgered' it was something wrong with the hd...

This is frequently a problem when hard drives are installed on top of
two floppy drives in SEs; in that case, the drive is almost *inside* the
CRT.  In an SE/30, there is more room above the floppy drive, so it's
less frequent.  With 3rd party mounting brackets, the drive is usually
farther back than with Apple's, under the neck of the CRT, so it's much
closer to that circuit board than an Apple drive would be.  I've never
played around to see whether the interference is with the circuit board.

>...suggestion was to take the drive and rotate it 180 degrees in
>the mount, so that you have to run the scsi cable underneath the drive to
>attach to the logic board.  I asked the Certified Idiot Apple Dealer to do
>so for me, and he said that he didn't think it was possible, so I took it to
>another dealer who promptly did so.

Well, the Dealer should have been a little more ambitious and looked,
but he was probably right that it could not be turned around using
Apple brackets and cables.  We've done it sometimes with drives that
have the Questronex bracket (from Argentina), but it's going to depend
on what you've got for cables.  For those kits that mount the drive
"right side up", it gets rid of an awkward twist in the SCSI cable.  We
frequently have to punch additional screw holes in the brackets to be
able to mount the drives in a way that's satisfactory.

Not all dealers are comfortable with these hacks; they'd prefer to just
do things the Apple way.  This reduces their risk, but may be reducing
their customer base and profits too.  We keep a supply of brackets,
cables and connectors around so the we can accomodate the more
adventuresome users.

-- 
steve.ligett@dartmouth.edu or ...!dartvax!steve.ligett