PB G3 hangs at boot (disk w/ ? icon)

I have an old PB wallstreet that I bought recently to get my feet wet in the world of Apple. It was very cheap but very stripped. In fact all I got in the mail was the laptop with a battery and a floppy drive. It has OS 10.1 on it, and I think OS 9. I've never had it boot into OS 9 (to my knowledge), but usually when I turn it on, there is a grey or tan screen with a very oldschool looking icon in the center of the screen. The point is I don't know a lot about what I have, or about whats wrong with it.

Anyway, it worked fine (slow, but fine) until yesterday. I had stuck in a VST zip drive and then turned on the PB. After OS X loaded, I put a disk in the zip drive. Everything locked. I chalked it up to lag and waited a few minuets but still nothing was happening. I tried the ctrl+apple+exit thing with no success, so finally I used the shift+ctrl+apple+power combo to reset it.

The boot after the reset, and all subsequent boots have resulted in hanging at that grey/tan screen I mentioned earlier, only now there is an icon of a floppy disk with a blinking question mark in the center. I tried taking out all of the drives/batteries unplugging the power adapter, re-attaching the power adapter and starting it with no avail. I tried resetting the PRAM battery and that as well did nothing.

I could think of no reason why any software would have been damaged, so I neglected a reinstall (also I have no disks or cd-drive).

Any help is appreciated.

have you recently installed any new hardware or software? also, try starting up while holding the shift key to boot without extensions.

Holding shift did not seem to work.
As far as new software, there has been none, but this was the first time I was using the zip drive.

did you have to install drivers for it to work? if so, that zip drives software may be causing an extension conflict. can you boot into os 9?

I didn't install any drivers, I just put the zip drive in and powered up, then put a disk in it to see if drivers were there from previous owner. It froze after that.
Unless there is a button combo to push to make it boot into 9, then I don't think it will.

if this was previously owned, Id recommend and erase and install before getting started or making it your own so you get a fresh start, as opposed to starting with someone elses problems.

I couldnt agree more, however the previous owner decided to not send the OS disks or, more importantly, the cd-rom drive.

For future reference though, a fresh install should work, right?
In other words, the 'disk with question mark' icon is a sign of software failure and not hardware failure?

you should get an external cd rom of some sort, and do an erase and install, that ? usually means its not recognizing a system folder on the hard drive at all, like theres not one there, the system may be corrupt.