"No entry"/Prohibitory Sign - G3 Won't Boot

I've recently bought a PowerMac G3 desktop on Ebay which was meant to come with an installed and running version of Panther.

It has just arrived, but unfortunately won't boot. It chimes, the Apple logo appears but then a prohibitory or no entry sign appears and won't let me any further.

I have tried following these guidelines (http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1892?viewlocale=en_US) to hit X on startup and reset the NVRAM and PRAM. But, I don't think the computer recognises the keyboard at startup as it's a standard windows usb keyboard rather than a Mac keyboard.

Is there anything I can do? I'm completely lost, having never used a Mac. I have no system disks and no other Mac to connect the harddrive to. I could connect the harddrive to a windows machine, but I don't know whether there is anything I could do to help it, or even if I would be able to access the files from a PC.

Could somebody please help me?

Sounds like the hard drive is either bad or the file system is damaged. Unfortunately, there's no easy fix to this - especially without access to your system discs.

I would ordinarily suggest picking up a copy of Disk Warrior, which comes with a bootable disc to use to repair these kinds of issues, but I really think it's unlikely that it's just a corrupted FS. It's more likely that the drive was on its way out, and the jostling associated with the shipping process probably did it in once and for all.

I'm not sure that it's worth the money to invest in such an old machine, but if you really want to ressurrect it, you'll need a new HDD and purchase a copy of OS X 10.4 (Tiger). That's going to be difficult to find, but the newest version (10.5, AKA Leopard) won't run on a machine that old.

I've been looking at your problem too. And could only come up with what the above said. And what the above said is good advice. But one little thing. I'd only recommend 10.3 (panther) on it. As on my old imac (33mhz) it ran 10.3 on it really well. But 10.4, was not possible for many reasons.

But it's your call. Someone here might know how to optimize a G3 for 10.4

And lastly next time don't buy any mac on ebay without system/software discs for all it's installed apps.
Good luck and hope you get it all sorted out tough.