[bgeeves]

My Power Mac 8500 is down. When it starts, instead of the happy face there's a question mark.

PROBLEM: my disc drive hasn't worked in years so I can't start up from the original 8.5 disc. Floppy also doesn't work. BUT the machine has worked perfectly for years until this sudden problem.

Is there anything I can do myself, other than take it in for repair or buy a new mac?

THANKS for any help.

[:XI:]

Try Zapping the PRAM.

Your PRAM battery could be dead, it would need replacing.

Your Hard Disk could be dead, it would need replacing.

Your CD-rom is dead, it needs replacing

Same for the floppy

If you have another mac, you could take the drive from the 8500 place it in another mac and install the OS. Then replace it into the 8500.

[tooki]

Hard drives need maintenance. Clearly, since you haven't had a working drive for a long time, you haven't been doing that. Most likely the drive is just corrupted, and needs to have DiskWarrior run on it, but you need to boot from CD to do that.

I suggest you buy a cheap used CD-ROM drive for it to replace the broken one, then run DiskWarrior on it.

tooki

P.S. Dead PRAM battery would lead to a black screen, not a blinking "?".