Hi! I sure hope you can help me or know some place I can go to get help. I run an in home day care and preschool. I have two macs and neither one work now. I have a Power Mac 7500/100 and a PowerPC 7200/120. I run a OS 9 on both. When the first one died I purchased the second one. Well the second one did the same thing as the first. I have now concluded that one of the children may have "trashed" the hard drive. They have a habit of placing everything into the trash. Both computers can not find or recognize the hard drive. I can put the OS disk in and start it up that way. I have held the shift key down as start up.....nothing. I have inserted the start up diskette in...nothing. no drives are recognized. Is there any hope for my macs? I don't have alot of money to buy new ones or expensive repairs. I am computer literate enough for someone to give me the steps; however I can't seem to find anyone who can do this. I only get comments like "you should get rid of those Macs". Nut'in doin'. I am a Mac user thru and thru. Please guide me to the right solutions. Thanks ahead of time, Melissa Denton Denton Day Care & Preschool. Missy Mac

Firstly..i don't think trashing files will lead to an inability to recognize the harddrive (lots of other problems tho!). Are you using "the Grouch" ? Kids cant seem to get enough of him and you could lose a *lot* of files that way :).. I hava a "stand-alone" Grouch i could send you..meant for situations like this,that doesn't require emptying the trash...if your current prob gets resolved.. As to that..with the 7200 and related macs, SCSI problems are the most common reasons that harddrives end up missing..did you have anything plugged into the SCSI port on the back?..what happened right before the drive disappeared?..the fact that both had the same thing happen to them consecutively suggests that they both shared a harddrive or external device plugged in the back. Have you checked if Drive Setup can see the Harddrive ? If you haven't done so already, run Drive Setup and see if it recognizes the drive..if so, then you have the choice of either using a file recovery program to first retreive any important files, and then re-initialize the disk, or just re-initializing right away if you don't have any files you need terribly..either way you'll have to re-install MacOS..and if the drive disappears again in a week or month or so, you likely have a SCSI termination problem. Changing what you have plugged into the back can cause this, or if the device is not terminated properly ( a terminator is a kind of plig that goes at the other end of the chain (or cable, if you have only one thing plugged in)from the mac. Also, when re-installing MacOS, if you have OS9, go ahead and install it..but if you don't have it and need to find a copy, you'd do better to try and find OS8.6..on those machines, it's more stable on old world macs, and (surprisingly enough), there's a few capabilities in MacOS that were removed in ver9x (such as mounting certain kinds of files and other disk and device recognition issues)..8.6 is faster and can do almost everything 9x can do.... HTH