My Mac Classic Won't Boot. Only Brings up Floppy with question mark.

It's probably software; insert a boot floppy and run Disk First Aid on the internal drive. You may need to install a new OS.

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jackharrison21 wrote:

[...] However, after that the problem started again and I have not managed to get it to boot succesfully from about fifty attempted boots. Does anyone know if this would be a hardware or software problem and how to solve it?

It's a hardware problem. Your hard drive is no longer spinning up - it's suffering from "stiction," where the viscocity of the spindle or head lubricant gets too thick for the drive motor to overcome.

The way to solve it permanently is to replace the hard drive with a solid state solution. Working backwards... the next easier solution is to open the machine up, remove the hard drive, and rotate it sharply along the axis of the spindle. That may loosen the platters enough to let it start up again once you put it back together. And the easiest solution - boot from a floppy.

You can't create a floppy using a Windows machine. The drive speeds and writing techniques are incompatible. You can use a service like this to make one for you, or just find someone or a user group locally with older Mac hardware.

Hi Jack,

The Macintosh Classic can handle both 800K and 1.44 MB floppy disks. It is possible (but rather complicated) to create a bootable (sector-copied) 1.44 MB diskette from certain disk images on at least a Windows XP machine with a built-in floppy drive.

The British System 7.0.1 Disk Tools download can be used.

http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Software_Updates/English -British/Macintosh/System/System_7.0.1/

An appropriate Windows version of StuffIt/Aladdin Expander would be required to decode the .bin (and subsequently decompress the intermediate file). Furthermore, one would need a suitable PC disk image program (such as WinImage) to write the resulting image to a 1.44 MB floppy.

Jan