We (my family) had a Quadra 610 we purchased in January 1994 and used for nearly 5 years without problems. It got less used when we bought other new computers (we currently own one of the latest iMacs), but I never wanted to get rid of it.
We had kids and so had "At Ease" installed. As the years went by, the Quadra 610 sat in my son's room unused.
Recently, I thought I'd start her up and play some of the cool games we had installed (remember "Warlords II"?), but couldn't get past the "At Ease" passwords, we'd forgotten them all!
To cut the long story short, I managed to find a way past "At Ease" by booting with the "Disk Tools" floppy disk and disabling "At Ease". I booted normally and was very happy to see the regular, old Mac desktop (OS version 7.5.5). I had booted and rebooted two or three times just to make sure things were OK.
Then I spent several hours rediscovering the programs, games and utilities I'd installed all those years ago.
I was having too much fun and the session was going well past my bedtime
Suddenly, we had a power cut (the Quadra 610 is protected by a surge protector) and the Quadra 610 powered off, but the power came right back on. It was probably "somebody" telling me to get off to bed, so I left it until the next day.The next day, I powered on the Quadra 610, but got the disk icon with the blinking question mark
I tried a few times, but nothing doing. I booted with the "Disk Tools" floppy disk. The only thing I could see with the Finder was the "Disk Tools" disk, there was no sign of the Quadra 610's hard drive. It's as if there isn't one there any more.My first thought is that the hard disk drive controller was somehow zapped by a power surge when we had our power cut or when the power came right back on again. I can't understand how this happened since the Quadra 610 is supposedly protected by a surge protector.
After all these years of non-use, I can't believe after playing with the Quadra 610 for one day that some power cut has basically killed it. Despite it being an old computer that nobody uses any more, I'm still pretty down about it.
Can anyone suggest a way to access the hard drive drive? Am I right in thinking it is now a dead drive (zapped controller, perhaps?)? Is there a part I could try replacing to revive the drive? I know I could probably get a new drive, but all my stuff is lost on the old one (hmmm, I know I have a backup somewhere...).
Any ideas, suggestions or comments are welcome, even if it is to confirm the drive is dead.
Basically, if the drive is truly dead, it's probably going to be the final R.I.P. for my Quadra 610, I may not want to spend any more time, money or energy trying to revive it (again!). Such a shame though. A nice computer.
Thanks,
- gazarcher
