Dead Hard Drive on LC

I have an old LC and when I startup it up it blinks the question mark in a disk. But when I stick in the System 7.1 Disk Tools disk it starts up fine, no prob, Bob. But when I get to the finder there is no hard drive on the desktop. (I'm actually a teacher and these Macs are used in my classroom) I've contacted a Mac System Administrator for our school and she says that sometimes hard drives just die. I don't buy this. There's got to be someway to fix it without spending money and taking it someplace.

unfortunately she's probably correct. you could try to use a utility such as scsiprode to force the drive to mount, but it's not very promising. you could also try to boot holding down the shift key but not likely to work. were there any signs of trouble earlier

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IT'S NOT A BUG, IT'S AN UNDOCUMENTED FEATURE