Chapter 1: show me what you got

Today's patient is a Power Macintosh 4400/200. It's Computer from 1997 wit a 200MHz Motorola 603e PowerPC CPU.

Around the back it has a DB-15 Port for Video, a single ADB Port, two 3.5mm jacks for a speaker and a microphone. To the right there's a DB-25 Port for SCSI and next to it a RJ-45 Port for ethernet on a separate card. Next to the ADB Ports are also a Printer Port and an External Modem port.

On the front is a lot of yellowing and residue from a sticker put there by the auction house. More interesting there's also a 3.5" Floppy and a CD drive with the power button right next to it. Below those there's the

// Power Macintosh 4400/200 //

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badge with the old rainbow Apple logo.

Thanks to

everymac.com

for some of the technical specs.

Close-up photo of a badge that says 'Power Macintsh 4400/200' with the rainbow apple logo above.

A picture of an Apple Power Macintosh 4400 from the front.

A picture of an Apple Power Macintosh 4400 from the back.

A picture of the sticker residue on the top right of the front case plastic.

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Before turning it on for the first time in probably years, I wanted to make sure everything is well on the inside, so I started to take it apart.

After unscrewing the three bolt that hold the top lid on, I was able to slide and lift it away from the machine. The Inside was as nice as it probably can be at that age. No leaky or bulging caps, no spilled liquids, just loads of dust. Nothing some compressed air can't fix.

A photo of me using a beat up ifixit screwdriver to take out a screw on the back of a computer.

A photo from the inside of a very dusty computer showing part of the motherboard and an expansion card.

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I went ahead to take out components to clean and/or test them separately. The

// Apple Ethernet CS II Twisted-Pair Card //

---

with its beautiful and simple name came out first together with its riser, the 2GB Quantum Fireball HDD was next. After I removed the front Panel I finagled out the mid frame that also holds the CD and Floppy drives.

With the help of the service manual I then removed the motherboard. Before removing it I made note of which connectors plug where. It was only visibly held in by a plastic clip on the front and the ports in in the I/O shield on the back. There was a bunch of pegs that, by the looks of it, where only there for alignment purposes but held onto the PCB for dear live. I ended up spraying some lithium grease on them which helped me tremendously to slide the mainboard off without breaking it.

Last but not least where the AT-Style power supply and the assembly that holds the internal speaker and a fan in the front. The Power Supply was the dustiest of all components by a wide margin.

A Apple Ethernet CSS II Twisted-Pair card.

A riser-card with three edge-connectors on the front and golden contact-fingers on the bottom of the pcb.

A 3,5 inch Quantum Fireball hard drive

The front panel after taking it off of the computer sitting on a desk

A big metal bracket with a 3,5 inch floppy drive and a 5 1/4 inch CD drive mounted to it. Below the CD drive is an empty space for a hard drive.

A very dusty computer motherboard on a desk.

A photo looking into the air-holes on a power supply which is filled with lots of dust.

A plastic assembly holding a speaker and a fan. Both are very dusty.

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Now with everything laid out on my desk, I could finally start to work on it properly. I wish I took a photo of the empty case but I didn't. Or at least I can't find it anymore.

Chapter 2:

dump it like it's hot

The next thing I wanted to do was to image the hard drive. Depending on the sellers due diligence it either had a working install of the system software with a bunch of files or nothing at all on it. Having a working installation to test the machine is always great. Maybe I'd even get some free software to play around with.

So I plugged into a portable USB-IDE Adapter and connected it to my laptop. Then I had to unmount the automatically mounted HFS partition because Linux be like that. After that I could use disk

dump to make a backup of the whole drive. The whole way trough it sounded perfectly healthy so I had no concerns about putting it back into the computer,.

A old hard drive plugged into a USB adapter. The adapter is held to the drive with some tape.

A screenshot from gnome disk manager showing the partition table of the drive.

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