Powerbook 100 Experience

[Win16fan]

Hello,

 

For years I've always wanted to own an old Apple computer and last month I finally bought one for $25 at the local flea market complete with batteries (which were dead), power supply (tip was cracked), manual, carrying case, floppy drive and floppies (1 OS, 1 system tools, 1 Microsoft Excel). The computer is in nice cosmetic condition, but it has a couple of problems:

 

1) It doesn't recognize the hard drive

 

2) It makes this weird buzzing sound on start up before the boot up music starts.

 

I opened it up and didn't see anything wrong on the motherboard (no busted caps, all cables were connected). I didn't open up the monitor. Anyway, the computer doesn't boot to the OS anymore. It did boot to it from the included OS disk, but now it won't even do that. It just gives me an image of a monitor with a question mark. Oh well, I've been dealing with used hardware for years and know that sometimes you buy something that ends up not working. Nothing new to me. At least I got to experience old Mac OS 6 and I quite liked it. The trackball mouse was different, but I liked that too. It came with a sticker sheet that had unused stickers featuring the old, and in my opinion better, Apple logo, so I guess it's not all bad. Still, I wished the Powerbook actually worked. It's now the oldest computer I own.

 

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

[Osgeld]

check the internal battery, mac's "cmos" or PRAM battery as its know in that universe can cause boot issues if dead, usually not in the old machines though, more like power PC's ... that being said it could be an issue

 

another thing to try is resetting the pram, hold down command, option, P and R on the keyboard and power the machine up, keep holding them until you hear a second chime (usually about 5-10 seconds depending on how long it takes to count ram)