Boot Problems

It should boot from the hard drive. The blinking disk is its way of saying it can't boot from that device. Same after you insert a diskette. If it's not a system disk it will give you the same message, or if the disk drive doesn't work, it will give the same message. I don't know macs well enough to give real help, except to say you need to talk to a mac-dude...

When you power it up, listen and see if you can hear the hard drive spin up. If not, maybe it's broke, or maybe the power cable inside came undone. If you can hear it and it doesn't sound sick, maybe it suffered a logical failure (needs reformat/reinstall), or maybe the IDE cable is loose inside.

Mike.