Hacker News Reader

Probably will not start. It requires a working clock chip to turn on and the battery is way past its expiration date.

There are plenty of tutorials on where to dig into the epoxy and add a cr2032 battery holder to fix it permanently.

Same deal with various SPARC machines (those will at least power on)

Thanks for your comment, I had no idea. Out of curiosity, do you know if it's dangerous or otherwise unadvisable to try and start it before making this modification?

I don't think anything bad happens, it just doesn't react to the power button and people mistakenly junk them.

The O2 shouldn't need a PSU capacitor replacement yet.

If you want to give the SCSI disk a better chance, place it flat on a table and rotate rapidly, then stop. You should feel the spindle spin.

Hardware of this era is still quite reliable so I don't think you will have problems.

It did in fact start back up again, but to what extent I don't know because it seems the power supply to the flat panel I have is fried. The O2 did play the guitar sound when starting though, and boy did it stir up memories!

The fan is also a lot louder than I remember. Thanks for the tips sir, I'll try to get the screens running to see if I can find any fun data on the drive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com