Hi, this is a new post concerning a problem i asked about before (http://computing.net/mac/wwwboard/forum/8492.html). To reiterate, i have a power mac 7200/75 which was shutdown impoperly and will only boot to a happy face mac icon, and i have waited a long time. Holding down cpombop keys that i have read about does nothing. I like to restore things, and would like to learnn mac's, but as this computer is in old (95)i didn;t really want to spend much $ on it. I was told i need a mac OS cd, which i prayed to get and now have (sent from a friend in florida you no longer uses it). It is a mac 8.5. So i put it in and held the c key and booted up, but it does the same thing - goes as far as the happy face and stays there. However the cd rom runs for a few minutes. I also tried holding other keys at boot up, like shift, or c, d or p, to no effect. Could this be the battery? But the problem started after being shut down improperly, and it also had only 2.8 mb free on the HD. Any advice advice is appreciated.

I've got a couple of old 7000 series PPC's myself so I don't think the PRAM battery is likely to prevent your 7200 from booting. The booting process can freeze at the smiley face if you have a SCSI device conflict. Your SCSI devices such as the internal CD ROM drive, internal hard drive and any external SCSI devices should each have a unique ID. Have you been playing about with the jumpers on the internal drives by any chance? Did you ever have problems booting before the improper shutdown incident? OS 8.5 should work on a 7200 but I'm wondering whether you have enough RAM to allow it to boot from CD. Certainly, if you wanted to install 8.5 you would need significantly more RAM than the 8 MB that you mention in your post header. I did have an almost identical problem with one of my 7000's. I tried all kinds of fixes (using spare bits that I had lying around) including replacing all the internal drives, CPU, RAM and VRAM, I even tried a replacement PSU. None of this worked so I assumed it must be a problem on the motherboard itself. Sure enough, after finding a cheap replacement mobo via eBay, everything worked fine. Have you tried booting from a diskette (floppy disk)? I would suggest the following: Check jumpers on CD ROM and hard disk to make sure you have unique ID's. Disconnect the internal hard drive (pull out power & data cable with machine unplugged from mains) and try booting using the CD. Try a boot diskette if you have one available. I don't think it would be worth spending much money on replacement parts for a 7200 although if it's just the hard disk that's the problem then you could probably find a suitable replacement quite cheaply.

JesusPeace, My first hunch was simliar to what Pyran mentioned. I have an iMac DV/SE that will sometimes not boot because of a problem device on a USB bus. When I unplug the device it will boot fine. That is very predictable- when it is having trouble, removing that device solves the problem. What is not predictable is not booting. I can leave the device plugged in and most of the time it boots fine. Just once in a while it freezes. You might unplug everything but the keyboard and mouse and see how it goes. If your Mac will shut down by holding the power key down you might even try booting without the keyboard and mouse. If it boots then you can narrow down the cuplrit. waterboy