Newbie Collector needs advice

[elchimpy]

I love macs so I made the leap to collector. A lot of the machines I acquired start up but give me the blinking question mark. They are primarily 68k all-in-ones. Can anyone point me in the right direction as to troubleshooting resources to get these bad boys up and running?

Working or not, their presence makes me happy. Weird?

 

[David Schmidt]

A lot of the machines I acquired start up but give me the blinking question mark. They are primarily 68k all-in-ones. Can anyone point me in the right direction as to troubleshooting resources to get these bad boys up and running?

Which ones, exactly? Original Macs and Mac Plusses didn't even come with hard drives. So they require floppy disks to start up with. Later models (SE, SE/30, etc.) had hard drives, but sometimes they suffer from stiction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiction#Hard_disk_drives) and need to be shocked loose so the spindle can start rotating.

A blinking question mark means it's looking for a boot device (or media in a boot device). So either it needs a floppy disk inserted or it needs the hard disk to start spinning.

Working or not, their presence makes me happy. Weird?

Weird.

 

[Consultant]

everymac.com
lowendmac.com

Find out what model you have, get OS that works with the model.

 

[Rodus]

Here, we're all collectors so if you have any questions or need advice you can pretty much bet on someone having the answer.

 

[seamus26]

My advice is to take an afternoon and dig up the specs on each one of your Macs. I have about a dozen of them and they're all a little different, especially when you get into the older models. I know my Classic will boot from ROM (I forget the key sequence) if the hard drive crashes, which is a sweet option. You probably already have, but if not check out this site :

http://www.apple-history.com/

I really like the way it's laid out, and there's some really good info on what your machine needs.

Cheers!