[Brlailea]

I am working on a customer's laptop
:

Macintosh / Apple Powerbook 3400c

They left me 3 cd's all original versions :

Mac OS 7.6
Mac OS 9
Mac OS X
and one floppy that states:
Disk Tools Macintosh PowerBook 3400 series

The laptop has only a cd-rom (harddrive and all that good stuff but no floppy. . . and the customer doesn't have a floppy for it).


The laptop boots up with the desktop screen and a small floppy with a ? mark in it.

I have tried booting from all three cd's by holding down the C key as its booting but I still get to the desktop with the floppy and the ? mark. . . .

How would I go about possibly repairing this laptop????


Thanks in advance

Cynthia

[cpuhack.com]

First, zap the PRAM. Then, try booting from the MacOS 8 or 9 CD by holding the "C" when booting (as you've been doing).

Oh, if you aren't familiar with zapping the PRAM...it's "Control+Command+P+R"...hold them down before the system tries to boot from the hard disk. Keep holding them down until the system auto-restarts itself a couple times.

EDIT: I forgot to mention if this still doesn't work the hard drive is probably shot.

[Brlailea]

So if it does nothing and goes back to the screen with the floppy and the ? mark the hard drive is shot?

Because that is what it does

[cpuhack.com]

At the very least the partition is way damaged. However, that shouldn't prevent you from booting to a CD (even if the Startup Disk is the hard drive as it 99% assuredly is). The other alternative would be to connect an external SCSI hard drive (essential to own one if you're routinely working on older Mac's) and boot from it. Once booted from that drive, you could use the standard MacOS disk utilities to attempt repair of the hard drive...but...you'll have much better luck with commercial software like FWB HD Toolkit.

[Brlailea]

Okay thank you!

I am going to call the customer and see if they want to spend the time fixing this because I found the EXACT model on Ebay for 225 and the lowest for 50.

Thank you for your help so far.

If they decide they want to fix it I will get back and see how I am going to go about it