end of the road for my Color Classic???

Greetings. Lifelong Mac user here who, in the wake of Jobs’ passing, retrieved my Color Classic from the attic, thinking it would surely boot right up. It worked as recently as maybe 4-5 years ago, but all attempts over the past month to successfully boot it up have been in vain. After one purchase from Radio Shack and three from eBay, I’m 99 percent done throwing any more money at it. But I’d like to see if any of you could maybe help me out before I give up the ghost. I don’t have long, since I’ll need to return the internal HD I just bought off eBay soon if I want a refund. Here’s the rundown:

** Initially, it would boot up without the startup chime, show a grey screen for a minute or two (no icons at all), then give the eight-tone chimes of death.

** Buying a new PRAM battery led to it giving the startup chime and showing the smiling Mac, but that would give way to the flashing question mark over the floppy icon. I tried resetting PRAM, which did lead to the three successive startup chimes, but still got the question mark afterward.

** Next thing I did was buy a complete set of 7.1 discs off eBay. Using either the Disk Tools disc or the Install Me First disc, I would get the startup chime and smiling Mac, but then I couldn’t get past this message: “This startup disk will not work with this Macintosh. Use the latest installer to update this disk for this model.” For some reason, the mouse wouldn’t work when doing this, so I’d have to power off with the main switch and then eject the floppy with a paper clip. I would later learn that these discs apparently wouldn’t work on the CC because of a missing System Enabler.

** Next step: buying 7.6 Disk Tools discs off eBay. This time, the startup chime and happy Mac gave way to a sad Mac icon, a "0000000F / 00000066" error message and four-tone chimes of death. That led me to believe my factory HD was bad, sooooo …

** I bought an internal HD off eBay with 7.5 already installed on it. I had high hopes that this would finally do the trick. The heavens would open up and I would see the desktop. But ... after the swap, I was greeted once again with the flashing question mark. I disconnected and reattached the data and power cables to the HD three times, but to no avail. I tried booting off the 7.6 Disk Tools with this new HD, but got the sad Mac / "0000000F / 00000066" sequence once more. I tried booting off the 7.6 Disk Tools with no HD attached and got the same thing. This was the most depressing night of all.

** Today, with the new HD installed, I tried booting off of old 7.0.1 and 7.1 startup floppies my dad made back in the day -- and one or both of them actually progresses past the smiling Mac to the "Welcome to Macintosh" screen. But then, the "use the latest installer" screen takes over.

So this is where things stand. I'm holding out hope that I can having a working CC without spending any more money, but I'm not optimistic. Tonight I might trying washing the logic board in the dishwasher, as well as booting with the logic board disconnected and then pushing it in shortly after the startup chime (which I had tried with the factory HD without success).

Any thoughts? Ideas? Or should I call it a day, put it back on the side mantle in my living room, and go the Macquarium (or MacAntFarm) route down the road? Thanks in advance for your help!

Forgot to mention that when I try to boot off the new internal HD that I got off eBay, it briefly makes knocking sounds, capped by a "rat-a-tat-tat-tat" noise that lasts a second or two, before the flashing question mark appears. For whatever that's worth.

Also also, the "new" internal HD with pre-installed 7.5 that I bought turned out to be a 700MB NEC model from 1995. Would that inherently cause any problems with a May 1993 Color Classic that most likely had been running on the latest OS available on the factory HD?

Here’s a 40-second video I took when I thought I was it about to finally start up; you can hear the HD “rat-a-tat-tat-tat” noise that I was talking about shortly after the chime:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3434609/IMG_0484.MOV

I'll habe a look at the video and get back to you, I have a lot of experience from back in the day and some original install images (I think somewhere) as well as a working SE30

Takes some remembering. The install discs should be System 7, perhaps, and then updatable to 7.0.1 by way of some eighteen floppies?

I knew it was somewhere, and legal to download, the "use the latest installer" bit sounds like some of those disk images were for another classic Mac so you may need some universal install disks.

Anyway, system 7.5 is available from a link on loewndmacs's pages, which is also a great resource for macs in general and also older macs in particular

Classic Mac OS Downloads and Updates

With the right set of floppies or an external SCSI drive you can fix the thing. To use a preistalled OS on a HD it has to be installed as a universal install. meaning the firmware is present for most all mac models. I could fix in a few minutes.