MAC help, disk with flashing X in it on startup

[Rally1]

OK i have not seen a mac since my apple 2E... but the boss lady decided i should fix her old powermac today, while the NA is away.

Turn it on, it has a little picture of a floppy, with a question mark in it... put a disk in, it flashes an X and spits it out.

the last time they used it they pulled a disk our before it shut down.... ideas?


Mac newbie.


or point me at a mac forum for this kinda question.

 

[kd7fhd]

Sounds like your boot floppy is bad.

Try these guys:

Mac World Forums

They should be able to help.

 

[Rally1]

thanks for the link, ill check it out.

I found this on deja.com:

> > shepherd1000 <shepherd1000NOshSPAM@juno.com.invalid> wrote:
> I'm running system 7.5 on an old Mac Quadra 610. Suddenly, on
> attempted bootup, it started showing a blinking question mark on
> a disk icon. I believe this means that the Mac is not able to
> locate a startup disk. Why all of a sudden? I tried to
> reinstall the system software, but it's unable to locate a disk
> to install it on. Any idea what the problem is? Is my hard
> disk permanently crashed? Any potential solutions to get the
> hard disk up and running again? Any help would be greatly
> appreciated. Please respond via email to:
> shepherd1000@juno.com. Thanks!!

If it can't find the hard disk, them you need a bootable disk to repair the
hard disk, such as the Disk Tools floppy disk, which has Disk First Aid. Or,
Norton Utilities v1-v3.x (version 4 & 5 are for Power Macs only).

This type of problem usually occurs when you've crashed, which invariably
damages the hard disk's directory structure. So, everytime a crash occurs I
highly recommend that you run a disk repair prog to valid the HD.