There are many ways to get information about/take care of a hard drive. Your all-PB line-up (as in your sig.) may add another difficulty, but your options could include: being told by the seller which System was in place; booting from the drive; booting from a floppy; using SCSI Disk mode from a desktop; or removing the drive to another machine. All, some or none of these may be available to you at the moment, but one of them is necessary for you to make progress. Your immediate problem is to be sure of the power-supply, of course, and then to work systematically through the requirements for a valid startup volume and so on. At some point an examination of the PB's insides will not go astray, if for no other reason than to know that nothing vital (such as the HDD, if you cannot hear its activity?) is missing. Best of fortune, anyway.

de