I am a comp guy, decided to get into MACs by buying a nice 5300ce setup. everything is great hardware-wise, and for just having it for three days, thanks to my excessive studying I am decintly knowledgeable about it. When I recieved it I had to replace the PRAM batt. Done, easily workes fine. I have OS disks of 7.5.3-5, 8.0-1-6. The HD was quite trashed and since you never know what a used PC has been through as part of my refurbishment I performed a LOW LEVEL FORMAT and WRITE ZEROS. Now, the problem is no matter what OS I install during the STARTING UP level, the bar moves about an 8th of the way then lockes up, it is in excellent shape and came still packaged with everything just like new from Apple. No amount of reseting helps this problem. It did this sometimes with the install it came with but never this badly, I want to know if there is a setting in the OS or perhapes on the MB that will fix this. I get in just fine on first boot after install but then any time after that. It locks, sometimes I can get in two or three times but it feels like things have to be going just right to get in more often than once.