if a PowerPC boots up with a ? can you tell if the unit is 100%?

[part12studios]

I am looking at a possible purchase but the owner says they wiped the hard drive clean and that it shows a ?   

I don't believe they are being dishonest, but I'm also not trying to be scammed.  If a unit gets to that point, does it mean the system itself is ok and that it just needs to have OS9 or OSX installed on it to obviously boot up the system?

I could imagine maybe the HDD controller could be bad too and thus making the HD not show..  this could be a serious problem, but maybe a problem like that would have given still some other more informative error that tells the system it's not 100%

I'm asking them to take it a step further and install OS9 9.2.2 image from this website so I know I can buy it with confidence..  However I don't want to lose the potential buy if he refuses to do it and I miss out on reasonable deal. 

Thanks,
Caleb

[Daniel]

If it got to the point where it trys to find a disk, that means Open Firmware thinks it is ok. Quite a few subsystems must be up and running before it gets to that point.

Any problem would have to not involve power, memory, the cpu, sound, the screen, and the core chips which interface between the cpu and all the other stuff observed to work. There could be one, but it is very unlikely. I would consider it safe.

I don't think you can easily check if a system is 100% even if it boots fine and the Apple Hardware Test CD reports no problems.

[GaryN]

From a practical viewpoint, as Daniel says, the fact that it's getting that far shows that the most failure-prone hardware systems are working.
That said, you cannot wipe the boot drive in a Mac, so either the drive could have been wiped from another one which was then removed, was removed, wiped and replaced, is defective, is just some random drive from another machine, or was carefully wiped by a caring, ethical person, gently replaced and just needs a fresh install.

So, you gotta ask yourself… Do I feel lucky?
Well…do ya punk?

There is very little difference between this and buying a used car. If you go into this expecting you may need to buy a new drive and/or other little things, you'll not be depressed when and if you do.

[FdB]

Hey Dirty Harry,
Remember when I wiped the HDs in my MDD using Norton
and it would then only allow installation of OS 9.2.2…
but not  OS 10.4?

Good times, ehh? 

http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php/topic,3813.msg25479.html#msg25479

[part12studios]

lol well to answer how this issue played out (and thank you for the replies) the seller of the MMD mac said the hard drive was just formatted..   i pointed him to the os9lives iso and he installed it and said it worked..  so that was great,

however for myself I found a 867mhz quicksilver for $50.. which was still an x2 speed boost from my other sawtooth mac.. I know the MMD might still be something i get if I need the fastest hack free mac for OS9, but $300 was a bit steep when this other option was nearby via craigslist. 

Thanks!
Caleb

[IIO]

i totally understand your thinking, but like daniel says, the quesionmark only means no bootable system, which is almost equal to an okay disk, controller, firmware, pram settings, and psu.

[part12studios]

yea i decided to not pull the trigger on that system.  the seller did later on actually install OS9 (owner didn't have any OS disks and I shared with him this fine community and OS9 resources) and I think it checked out.  I went from a 450mhz sawtooth to a 867 quicksilver and while it wasn't the nearly x2 boost in overhead i'd have liked looking at raw CPU clock speeds it was at least 25% faster and that was fine for the money spent.  $25.. vs. like $300 for that Mirror mac.  if a mirror mac comes along for cheap enough I'll migrate again.