The Dead Mac Scrolls

The Dead Mac Scrolls is Larry Pina's symptom-to-repair reference, Peachpit Press / Goldstein & Blair, 1992, ISBN 0-940235-25-0, 489 pages. The wiki's page title omits the year; the file is named for it.

Its subtitle in the Library of Congress record is the Macintosh Bible guide to saving a fortune on Mac repairs. Every entry follows the same four-part shape:

1. Symptoms in plain language, with a small picture of what the screen actually looks like.
2. Probable diagnosis — which board.
3. Solution — the part to change, by board reference, with a locator sketch.
4. Three costed options — do it yourself, third-party repair, dealer repair.

A representative entry, quoted because it shows the level of detail: for a machine that chimes normally but shows a dark or severely distorted display, whines at high pitch and then smells of burning, Pina's solution is to "replace the flyback transformer at board reference T1 and check/replace the BU406 transistor (horizontal output) at board reference Q3 (may be burned). If possible, replace with a heavy-duty BU406D transistor." The page carries a board sketch showing where Q3 and T1 sit.

Contents

• Introduction (p. 7); Guides for do-it-yourselfers (p. 9)
• 1 — Early Macs (p. 11)
• 2 — Mac SE and SE/30 (p. 144)
• 3 — Mac II (p. 221)
• 4 — Floppy disk drives (p. 243), including Replacing disk drive heads without test

 instruments (p. 265)

• 5 — Hard drives and other peripherals (p. 277)
• 6 — External monitors (p. 309)
• 7 — ImageWriter I, standard and wide (p. 348)
• 8 — ImageWriter II (p. 374)
• 9 — LaserWriter and LaserWriter Plus (p. 402)
• 10 — LaserWriter II SC, NT and NTX (p. 442)
• Parts vendors and service providers (p. 466); Symptom index (p. 470)

What it does not contain

• No schematics and no complete parts list. It names the part to change for a given symptom;

 it does not enumerate the board. For full analogue-board parts lists by the same author see
 Macintosh Repair & Upgrade Secrets.

• Nothing after 1992 — no Colour Classic, no LC 500 series, no Power Macintosh.
• Pina states on p. 9 that this is "a reference book, not a do-it-yourself repair guide"; the

 teaching material is in his other books.

• It is a secondary source. The costings are 1992 US dollars and are of historical interest only.

What it settles

The book's own bibliography (pp. 9–10) is a useful record of what else was published for these machines, and names documents this wiki does not hold: the Sams COMPUTERFACTS folder CPB/08947 for the ImageWriter I (29 pages, 1985), which carries a complete logic board schematic with marked reference voltages and a semiconductor cross-reference, and a further Sams folder CP27/09005 (37 pages, 1987). Neither is on this wiki, and both are component-level.

Pages that cite this document

• Macintosh 128K/512K Troubleshooting — symptom-to-board-reference entries for the early Macs
• Macintosh SE Troubleshooting, Macintosh SE/30 Troubleshooting
• Macintosh Repair & Upgrade Secrets — the same author's parts lists
• Macintosh II Repair and Upgrade Secrets
• Apple LaserWriter, Apple LaserWriter Plus

These procedures involve a charged CRT and a live analogue board. Follow CRT Discharge Procedure first.

Download: The_Dead_Mac_Scrolls_1992.pdf (56.1 MB)