I've had a Cube in storage for about 20 years now. I was getting worried about the batteries so took it out over the weekend to see how it was. I have checked the batteries in the past, and even now they look great with no leakage, so no damage done. I was just going to remove the batteries and put everything back, but I tried powering it up and nothing happened. It was working before being stored.
The Megapixel monitor is in great condition still, so that is really pleasing. The cube is not bad, the movers managed to break the back plate but otherwise it's not too bad. I've got an '030 and an '040 board, I've tried both and same result.
I'm not really sure where to start with getting it going and thought that maybe some of you knew more about this than me. I'd say the battery would be completely flat by now, will it still boot with a flat battery? Otherwise, what are the common faults that prevents booting? When I press the keyboard power button nothing happens at all, so it's like the power supply is not even being signalled to start up.
Nothing has been recapped, and maybe the hard disk will be dead by now. I do have another one that I purchased a while ago that should be much better, but I suppose I should just get a SCSI2SD. It has a MO drive too, I disconnected it just in case. I only have one disk for the MO drive and it's still in the plastic wrapper so I don't really want to try that out. I've got a CD drive and somewhere I have NeXTstep 3.3 CD's so I should be able to reinstall if needed.
The battery is for sure the first thing to check. The system will not boot without a good one. Secondly unplug everything inside except the motherboard. You should heard a click from a relay in the power supply if its trying to boot.
Thanks for this, got mine going too 👍