Oh, and I should clarify that there's no programmer's switch installed, and this isn't a hard restart. I don't get a second bong, etc.

The sequence is:

bong, question mark, drive noises and happy Mac, no more drive noises and back to question mark.

This is the sequence for whether booting up from the internal hard drive or the internal floppy drive.

I haven't tried booting from an external floppy drive or external SCSI drive, but I'm going to try that next.

It will try to boot from the internal hard drive first since I am getting a happy Mac from it. It'll be interesting to see if after it goes back to the question mark whether it moves down the line and tries to boot from an external. I suspect it won't since it doesn't try to boot from the hard drive after the internal floppy boot fails.

I'll report back after I try it.