I'm trying to help a friend who doesn't know anything about her laptop, and I'm usually a PC person, but I use Mac's at work all the time. Anyhow, the thing starts up with the blinking question mark. I've tried loading through a cd by holding "C" at startup, flashing pram, and almost any other combination of buttons you can imagine. The CDROM doesn't read any of the CDs provided with her computer, I tried going through Open Firmware, but I can't boot from the harddrive ("VHB is bad") and no luck getting any CDs to work either. There is no floppy drive :( Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

This problem usually occurs when laptops have been dropped or beaten up by an angry mob. Does the keyboard work? Did zapping PRAM etc actually do anything or were you pressing dead keys? Try connecting an external firewire HD with OS software installed. You can get a mac to boot from external by holding down the F key at startup. Or connect an external CD, Floppy and try similar.

Just read your post again, realised your running OS9. How old is this laptop? Try the above solution anyway but if the laptop is pre G4, buy a new one. It's probably just getting old.

Actually, this same problem happened to me a few months ago with my old Mac 6100 with OS 8.6. I got that blinking question mark, and it wouldnt go away. But, there IS a way to fix it. (And I'm sure my computer is way older than her laptop, and there's definitly a way you can fix this). What I did, was reinstall the whole operating system. That worked. Although, she's most likely going to loose everything on her harddrive. But the system will be up and working again.