[S_Lanaway]

Hello - any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. My 6500 won't boot up at all. I've never had this particular problem. Usually when I get the blinking question mark I can just boot up from the system CD and run diagnostics. In this situation, I get the chime, hear some regular noises and the blinking starts - I haven't been able to boot up from the System cd, the Applecare cd, the norton cd, or norton's on a floppy - the drives spin and then the computer ejects the media and goes back to the blinking '?'.

I have alternately zapped the PRAM, held down shift, c, shift-option-command-delete, option.

Any idea what could be the problem and what I should do? Thanks for any help you can give me!

[drewman]

First, try pushing the CUDA button. This is a small red or black button on the motherboard. It is a full hardware reset. If you can't find it, then take out the backup battery for at least 15 minutes. Put it back in and try a reboot then.

If this fails, then unplug your hard drive and then see if you can boot from floppy or CD-ROM.

Good luck!

drewman

[S_Lanaway]

Well folks, this issue came to a bizzare conclusion yesterday. After the much fiddling which I have described in previous posts I gave up and we brought the machine to the local Mac repair place in Toronto, CPUsed.

There was a young tech there who took the order, and looked with with interest at me as I described the machine refusing to boot from any kind of cd or floppy. The one good thing was that we both agreed the problem was not likely the hard drive, so there was a good chance we could salvage some files. They said the repair could take a week but that he would take a quick look...

[S_Lanaway]

Anyway, about 10 minutes later this repairman - named Byron - came back out and said everything was fine we could take the machine home. He suspected that the mouse or keyboeard was stuck in a command common to older machines on boot up that was telling the machine to 'eject all media' and find a system to boot from other than the hard drive. They didn't even charge us.

I brought the machine home, hooked it up without the keyboard and mouse and it booted no problem. After it was booted I hooked them up and everything's been fine since.

I'm just happy we're running it again but it was such a weird twist! Thank goodness this guy from CPUsed was nice enough to get involved and have a look. He could have easily been the grumpy type, taken it in, not bothered much about it - but he saved us a lot of trouble and we'll definately want to use thiis place for any further repairs. Now that's service!!