Re: ? on desktop when booting

A friend just called. His 5 year old iMac, when booting up, has a folder on it with a question mark within the folder icon. He could also not move his mouse cursor because the desktop had not booted up. All he sees is a white screen with the folder and question mark. A complete shut down and reboot did not help him.

Anyone have an idea what this means and what to do about it?

Thanks for any input.
Steve

















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Hi Steve,

That question mark in a folder icon means that the Mac can not find an operational hard drive with a bootable Mac OS. It could be a corrupted OS or a bad hard drive.

Does he have Disk Warrior? What Mac OS is he running? Does he have a bootable OS installer DVD?

--ken

Disk Warrior will find the start-up volume.

Cheers
Alexander

Hi Alexander,

Disk Warrior has a bootable Mac OS on it. When you start up from Disk Warrior, you'll be running from WD and not your internal hard drive. Running from DW you select 'Rebuild'. If there is a hard drive hardware problem DW will report as such. If you have a corrupted hard drive DW will attempt to fix the issues.

If DW can not fix your hard drive issues, then you'll have to boot up from your Mac OS installer DVD and reinstall your Mac OS.

This is for all Mac OSs before Mavericks. Mavericks has a built in 'Recovery' partition that you boot from to try and fix the hard drive.

--ken

Thanks Ken,
longhand answer to my shorthand answer. (g)

Cheers
Alexander

Hi Alexander,

I get paid by the word.

(g)

--ken

Now and then I had start-up problems with the old hard disk of my McBPro too. As I have quite a mess here my installer DVD is usually hard to find.

But I could overcome this problem with my good old G4 - connect the McBPro via Firewire as an external drive (Press T while starting) an then you can use the disk repair function. This worked well for several times - till I decided to get a new, bigger HD anyway.

Maybe that helps...