Maintenance Guides

RetroTechCollection Maintenance Guides
Preserving yesterday's technology for tomorrow

This is the index to the wiki's maintenance and repair material: the general procedures that apply to any machine, and the routes into the machine-specific guides.

Every link on this page goes to a page that exists. If you find one that does not, it is a fault — please report it or fix it.

Read these first

Bulged and vented electrolytic capacitors around the voltage regulator of a PC motherboard — the single most common fault the guides on this wiki deal with

Guide	What it covers
CRT Discharge Procedure	Anode charge, the earth return point, discharge tooling and the implosion hazard. Read before opening any machine with a picture tube
Battery Explosion, Capacitor or Corrosion Damage	Cell chemistries, which residue needs which treatment, and board repair after corrosion
Capacitor Failure Symptoms	Symptoms, testing, and what the manufacturers actually say about replacement
Recommended Tools	What you need, what a specification actually means, and static and electrical safety

General procedures

• Capacitor Failure Symptoms — recognising and testing failed capacitors of every family
• Battery Refurbishment — replacing and refurbishing battery packs
• Battery Explosion, Capacitor or Corrosion Damage — cleaning up and repairing corrosion damage
• Floppy Drive Repair — cleaning, lubrication, alignment and common faults
• Hard Drive Maintenance and Repair — stiction, head bumpers, controller boards, and what is realistically repairable
• Retrobrite — the hydrogen peroxide process, its hazards, and the evidence on whether it is worth doing
• CRT Discharge Procedure — high-voltage safety before opening a monitor or all-in-one machine
• Recommended Tools — equipment for the bench

Diagnostics

• Sad Mac Error Codes — decoding compact Macintosh start-up failure codes
• Sad Mac Decoder — the interactive decoder
• Diagnostic Serial Console — the Macintosh diagnostic serial port
• Commodore 64 Diagnostic Instruction and Troubleshooting Manual (326070-01) — Commodore's own diagnostic procedure

By manufacturer

Family	Maintenance	Troubleshooting	Capacitor guides
Apple	Apple maintenance guides	Apple troubleshooting guides	Apple capacitor guides
Atari	Atari maintenance guides	Atari troubleshooting guides	Atari capacitor guides
Sega	Sega maintenance guides	Sega troubleshooting guides	in the general capacitor category
Osborne	Osborne maintenance guides	in the general troubleshooting category	in the general capacitor category
Commodore, Sinclair, IBM, Acorn, Amstrad, Nintendo and the rest	all maintenance guides	all troubleshooting guides	all capacitor replacement guides

Storage devices

• Storage Devices — the drives themselves
• Floppy Drive Repair · Hard Drive Maintenance and Repair
• Disk II · Tandon TM100-1 · Tandon TM100-2 — worked examples with manufacturer figures
• Macintosh Floppy Drive Maintenance · Macintosh HDD Maintenance

Parts and documentation

Machines documented here but not yet written up

Some manufacturer documentation on this wiki covers machines that have no maintenance, troubleshooting or capacitor guide yet. The documents are the starting point if you want to write one.

• Sega Game Gear — Sega Game Gear Maintenance Manual (1992) (Sega's own, 82 pp: assemblies, disassembly, spare parts, PCB repair procedure and IC data for all four boards, but no schematic), Sega Game Gear VA1 Service Manual (Sega's own, 24 pp, the one-chip machine, with schematics, circuit board diagrams and a full electrical parts list) and Sega Game Gear TV Tuner PAL Service Manual (the MK-2101 tuner pack, with seven alignment procedures)
• Commodore 1541 — Commodore 1541 Troubleshooting & Repair Guide (Sams, 1986: theory of operation, schematics, parts layouts and parts lists, with the drive motor servo circuit documented separately for the 1540, 1541 and 1542)
• Apple ink-jet and dot-matrix printers — ten Service Source volumes with no article behind them: StyleWriter Service Source (the only one with a revision-identification procedure: Rev A logic board silkscreened QG2-5053, Rev B QG2-2403, and the two are not interchangeable), StyleWriter II Service Source, StyleWriter 1500 Service Source (no internal supply and no fuse), Portable StyleWriter Service Source (optional NiCd pack; four of its ten error-LED states are battery states), Color StyleWriter Pro Service Source, Color StyleWriter 2200 Service Source, Color StyleWriter 2400 Service Source (internal supply and fuse), Color StyleWriter 2500 Service Source (same chassis, external adapter, neither), Color StyleWriter Service Source (actually the 4100 and 4500 manual) and Color StyleWriter 6500 Service Source (with an NVM hex decoder that makes the printer's stored state readable without the driver software). Also ImageWriter II Service Source and ImageWriter LQ Service Source, both partial by Apple's design — the Take Apart and Adjustments chapters were shipped as a separate Paperless Printer file that is not here — and Envelope Feeder Service Source for the LaserWriter envelope feeder.
• Apple displays — Studio Display (17" CRT, 16" viewable image size) Service Source is the one Apple display manual here that publishes measured internal voltages with tolerances: anode 27 V DC ±0.2 V on Apple high-voltage probe 076-0392, B+ 180 V ±2.0 V at pin 180V on P305, heater 6.3 V ±0.63 V at pin H, and RGB cathodes 65–85 V at pins RD/GN/BL and near-equal to one another. Studio Display (21" CRT, 19.8" viewable image size) Service Source adds a power-board check — 6.7 V ±0.05 V at the cathode of diode DP9, adjusted on PP1 — and its own CRT discharge procedure. 17" ColorSync Displays Service Source and 20" ColorSync Displays Service Source are the AppleVision 750/750AV and 850/850AV manuals under the November 1997 names. Macintosh Portrait Display Service Source is the odd one out: Apple built domestic and international (“Series B”) versions whose troubleshooting and repair procedures differ, and its Adjustments chapter carries two different video procedures — “Video With Screen Control” and “Video Without Screen Control” — so identifying the set in front of you comes first. Studio Display (15" flat panel) Service Source and Studio Display DVI Service Source cover the flat panels, and between them carry Apple's three-way version-identification table. Read CRT Discharge Procedure before opening any of the CRT models.
• Apple Macintosh and Power Macintosh models with a manual here but no article yet — fourteen Service Source volumes. Compact and portable: Macintosh Portable Service Source (the one Macintosh whose main cell is a sealed lead-acid pack — it sulphates rather than leaking alkali, and a pack that has fallen below 5.4 V can no longer be recharged by the machine) and Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh Service Source (377 pages with no Take Apart chapter at all — there is no Apple-published disassembly sequence for that machine anywhere). NuBus Power Macs: Power Macintosh 7100 Series Service Source and Power Macintosh 8100/ WS 8150 Service Source, both of which carry the HDI-45 pinout and the logic-board connector map. PCI Power Macs: Power Macintosh 7200 Series/WS 7250 Service Source and Power Macintosh 4400 Service Source — both of those supplies are manually switched between 115 V and 230 V, not auto-ranging, so an imported machine can arrive set for the wrong mains — plus Power Macintosh 7300/ 7500/7600 & WS 7350 Service Source (whose Troubleshooting chapter carries Apple's 2/3/4/6 GB Firmware Utility, a software fix for a drive that mis-reports its capacity and looks dead), Power Macintosh 8200 and 8500 Series/WS 8550 Service Source (the only coverage anywhere of the Europe-only 8200), Power Macintosh 9500 Series Service Source (processor card treated as a separate module — a 9500 that will not chime is often a card that has worked loose) and Power Macintosh 8600/ 9600 & WS 9650 Service Source (700 W peak inrush, the figure to size a bench supply or UPS against). Also Macintosh Processor Upgrade Service Source for the PowerPC 601 upgrade card fitted to 68LC040 machines, and Power Macintosh/Performa 5200 and 5300 Service Source, which carries Apple's REA Procedures for the freezing and video colour-hue faults and prints separate power-supply and analogue-board take-apart procedures for Rev. A and Rev. B boards. Read CRT Discharge Procedure before opening the all-in-one models.
• Schneider-badged printers — Schneider DMP3000 Service Manual, Schneider DMP4000 Service Manual and Schneider NLQ-401 Service Manual, the DACH-region manuals for the Amstrad DMP3000, DMP4000 and NLQ 401. The DMP3000 manual carries a full electrical parts list; the DMP4000 manual gives the three fuse ratings (T5A, T3.15A, T1A); the NLQ-401 manual gives the carriage T-belt MM310-3.2, which also drives the ribbon feed.

Documentation categories

• Service Manuals — manufacturer service documentation hosted on this wiki
• Schematics — circuit diagrams and board drawings
• Documentation — datasheets, application notes and technical literature

Documentation here that is not a repair source

Two large collections on this wiki are software documentation. They are worth knowing about, and worth knowing the limits of: no figure on this wiki should be cited from any of them.

• Category:Apple Programming Documentation — around 160 programming books, compiler manuals and language references. Three items in it do bear on hardware: Motorola's MC68030 User's Manual (the manufacturer's own pinout, V_CC/GND pin assignments, maximum ratings and decoupling recommendation for the processor in the SE/30, IIci, IIfx, Classic II and LC III), Power PC Concepts Architecture Design 1994 for the PowerPC, and HyperCard Users Guide 1987, which is Apple's own. Twenty-five pages in that category embed a file that was never uploaded — see Category:Pages with broken file links.
• Category:Apple Documentation — the general Apple and third-party Macintosh books: the Macintosh Bible editions, Cary Lu's Apple Macintosh Book, the PowerPC and Power Mac guides and Apple's own design titles. Annotated there, and the repair-relevant ones are pulled out on Macintosh Repair Resources.
• Category:Commodore Books — sixty-nine third-party Commodore books, annotated. Four reach the hardware and are named on Commodore 64; The Anatomy of the 1541 Disk Drive is not one of them despite its title — it is a firmware book with no schematic, no parts list and no alignment procedure anywhere in its 340 pages.
• OS 8.1 Emergency Handbook 1998 — Apple's own owner-level troubleshooting booklet. Software and configuration, but two of its start-up checks are hardware: reseat memory and expansion cards for an unusual start-up sound, and replace the backup battery for a machine that will not start.
• MacsBug Reference and Debugging Guide — Apple's debugger manual. Its Debugging Strategies chapter is the reference for separating a reproducible software crash from a hardware fault before opening a machine.
• Capacitor Replacement Guides — machine-specific replacement lists

Contribute

Corrections are more valuable here than new pages. If a figure on this wiki has no source behind it, it should be corrected or removed — see Help:Editing, or raise it on the RTC forum.