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Powerbook 165c gray screen and strange sounds
Posted by: macragge on 2025-05-06 01:24:36
Hello all,
First of all, "Hi!" New to the forum, and old time Mac user here now going a bit retro again to re-experience some of the fun from childhood! (And to escape internet and AI when working/writing etc).

One questions here: I got this Powerbook 165c, which looks nice and all, but doesn't boot. I'm sure you've had many things on similar issues, but I couldn't find it, so sorry for making a new thread...

Anyone know what's the most likely issue here?

Boot chime, gray screen, then these funky sounds I don't know what mean (but some of you surely do - hope it's audible in the video).

I'm not very tech savvy in terms of opening up and changing parts in these old Macs, so I'm a bit limited in terms of the fixes I'm able to perform, unfortunately.
Posted by: demik on 2025-05-06 01:29:38
Probably dead hard drive. Most of them are dead at this point. The fact that the grey screen show up is a good sign however
Posted by: macragge on 2025-05-06 02:40:42
Probably dead hard drive. Most of them are dead at this point. The fact that the grey screen show up is a good sign however
Ah, I see! Trying to make a bootable floppy now – if it's the disk, I suppose it might boot from that and I'd know?
Posted by: cheesestraws on 2025-05-06 02:58:11
Agreed, that sounds to me like a hard drive being very unhappy. Do try a floppy, but also bear in mind a lot of floppy drives are knackered due to age and accumulated grot. It's also possible for a knackered hard drive to stop boot entirely, so you might want to unplug it before doing many more diagnostics.
Posted by: macragge on 2025-05-06 09:56:49
Thank you very much, both! I'll see if I can get the boot disk created - not a very simple thing itself, as my various machines have some dead drives, lack of disk copy (which I think I need), some that won't decompress my sits etc etc 😅 It is, however, great fun!
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