Boots to ?, no idea what to do now

[Crookedplatipus]

Hi guys!
I'm a total mac newbie, just had a customer drop one in our laps. It's a i-Mac and it's blue. Thats about all she could tell me about it. I believe it's running OS 8.5, but I'm not entirely sure. Basically, what happened was, it froze up on her while she was reading email. She couldn't get it to do anything so she unplugged it from the wall. Now when you try to boot, it give you a pic of a diskette with a flashing question mark (thank god its not the sad mac, I know that much). Ive tried booting from a cd (she has two that are supposdly bootable, software restore and software install, they both say they are bootable) Ive held the 'c' key down and tried delete-option-control-shift, but still gives me the same error. She lent us her Mac OS 8.5 for dummies book, and it suggested resetting the PRAM by holding down command-option-p-r at boot. Now it chimes at startup and quickly showes a folder with a smiley face, but then goes back to the question mark. HELP! Any ideas out therE?

 

[Zelandakh]

question mark mac means can't find bootable disk.

If it does it on a CD, then check cables - are they loose?

 

[Ecaboodle]

OK as Zelandakh says you need to find the boot disks that would have come with the mac when it was first brought.

Turn the mac on insert the CD and hold down the 'C' key. This should force the computer to boot from that cd. The should be a folder on the CD icon that comes up in the top right hand corner called 'Utilities'. In the there you should find a program called 'Disk First Aid' you need to run this app on the HDD.

Then reboot the computer, and the it should boot from the HDD again. If you can't fix it in 20 minutes call someone who can.