Powerbook 165c gray screen and strange sounds

[macragge]

Hello all,
First of all, "Hi!" New to the forum, and old time Mac user here now going a bit retro again to re-experience some of the fun from childhood! (And to escape internet and AI when working/writing etc).

One questions here: I got this Powerbook 165c, which looks nice and all, but doesn't boot. I'm sure you've had many things on similar issues, but I couldn't find it, so sorry for making a new thread...

Anyone know what's the most likely issue here?

Boot chime, gray screen, then these funky sounds I don't know what mean (but some of you surely do - hope it's audible in the video).

I'm not very tech savvy in terms of opening up and changing parts in these old Macs, so I'm a bit limited in terms of the fixes I'm able to perform, unfortunately.

 

[demik]

Probably dead hard drive. Most of them are dead at this point. The fact that the grey screen show up is a good sign however

 

[macragge]

Probably dead hard drive. Most of them are dead at this point. The fact that the grey screen show up is a good sign however

Ah, I see! Trying to make a bootable floppy now – if it's the disk, I suppose it might boot from that and I'd know?

 

[cheesestraws]

Agreed, that sounds to me like a hard drive being very unhappy. Do try a floppy, but also bear in mind a lot of floppy drives are knackered due to age and accumulated grot. It's also possible for a knackered hard drive to stop boot entirely, so you might want to unplug it before doing many more diagnostics.

 

[macragge]

Thank you very much, both! I'll see if I can get the boot disk created - not a very simple thing itself, as my various machines have some dead drives, lack of disk copy (which I think I need), some that won't decompress my sits etc etc It is, however, great fun!