Intel Mac :: Lion Won't Boot - Question Mark Folder Only?
Apr 17, 2012
I installed Lion on my Intel iMac (about 3 years old) several months ago and it was working fine. Then yesterday it stopped booting up. It loads a grey screen and then just shows an icon of a folder with a question mark in it. I tried the following:Holding Shift to start safe mode - no response, loaded question mark screenHolding Command Option P R - no response, loaded question mark screenRepair Disk from Disk Utility - says "the volume Bernard 1 appears to be OK"Verify Disk from Disk Utility - no response, loaded question mark screen I created a Lion recovery disk on a USB drive
My Friend gave me his Old IMac G5 and when I boot it a question mark and the finder folder blinks. My friend says to install OS X because its running on nothing and I have been trying to install. OS X 10.6 but it wont respond to the Disk it just keeps blinking after a while it starts making this. Loud noise as if its running something, the furthest I've got it to a blue screen with a replay icon button. Towards the left and an arrow button pointing right but cant do anything after that, I don't know what to do. My other problem is the I have the latest wireless keyboard and wireless magic mouse so I cant connect them thru wifi until I have my imac running so im using a normal Dell Keyboard....
I just bought a new iMac. I have been trying all week (with no success) to transfer files and apps from my previous iMac. The last time I tried to transfer, I used target mode on the old computer. It looked as if it was finally working, so I left with 2+ hours remaining on the transfer. When I returned, the computer was frozen and nothing would work. So I held the power button to turn it off. When I tried to turn it back on, there was only a gray screen with a flashing folder with a question mark. I feel like I have tried everything listed in other discussions. The only thing I am not able to try is to reinstall Lion because the new computer did NOT come with an OSX disc of any type.
My imac from 2009 won't boot up. It just keeps flashing a grey file folder with a question mark. Of course now I do not know where my start up cd is.....is there anything that I can do???
My macbook won't boot. A folder with a questionmark keeps flashing...What do I do, so I don't lose my documents?If I send it to reperation, will they see the last thing I did on it? Cause it was quite private...
Got ?folder on boot on late 2007 21"iMac today. Have tried usual stuff including resettng pram and booting from cd. 1st time I booted from install cd it wouldn't even mountthe HD. Turned off and left for a few hours to cool down. Next time ibooted from cd HD mounted and I ran disk utilty repair bit it said there were no problems. Tried to boot from HD no luck.
So, guessing HD is fried:-(
so, before I take it to the apple store to get it replaced (doubt under warranty) or do it myself I want to see if I can recover the mportant data. While I am sure it's all backed up on cradhplan I have 80gb of photos and I'd rather ecover from USB to ext HD instead of over Internet from cradhplan.
So, I'm thnking... When my TM blew up last year I took the HD out and took it to work and slapped it in a drive bay of my mac pro, recovered the data, put it back in the TM before shipping it back to apple for a replacement (that then went on eBay since I got cradhplan)
so; question 1: can I take the HD out of the iMac and have a go installing it in my mac pro? Will an iMac HD fit in the mac pro case/bay?
Question 2: all my photos are also on the apple tv. Can I copy them from the apple tv to another mac if my backup had failed and doesn't restore or I can't recover from iMac HD? I know I had cradhplan set to backup iphoto library but I upgraded to aperture 3 recently and am worried that I have nit set crashplan up to backup the aperture library
I'm having an issue with my PowerBook G4. It wouldn't turn on at all before, so I installed another motherboard. Now it will power on, but it only shows this folder icon that blinks. I'm a complete n00b to macs. If this were a PC I would of fixed it by now. I need some help. I've tried the installation disk, but when I hold down the C key, it takes longer, but it just shows that folder again. When I hold down the Option key, it only gives me a reload button, and an arrow button, but no boot up options. Do you think it could be a problem with this other used motherboard? Or is it that I just didn't put it in right? I've double checked all the hardware, and it seems to be all connected. The keyboard lights up, and the trackpad works, and it makes the boot-up sound.
I have just upgraded from a Macbook to a Macbook Pro and just swapped my hard drives. My OSX partition still works perfectly but when i now try and boot to my XP installation the laptop hangs and after about 30s i get the grey screen with a folder with a question mark in it which then blinks/flashes on the screen.Â
Does anyone know why this has happened???? I have googled it but to no avail. I havent tried to re-install windows yet, I hoping there is a quick fix.Â
So, I was on windows, using bootcamp, and I was creating partitions on a pen drive with it, and then it asks me that it needs to restart to apply changes.
But then, while restarting, a blue screen occurred (**** windows).... And I forced the shutdown pressing the power key.Â
Then, I simply turned the MacBook on, trying to boot on my snow leopard and I got a flashing folder with a question mark on it. Now I can't access any partitions on it, if I press option key on startup I get a blank window!Â
I tried to reset PRAM, repair the MacOs partition using the snow leopard DVD (it shows up fine, along with windows partition and EFI partition), and I still don't get my startup disk showing up...Â
Info: MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8), Snow Leopard with windows7 bootcamp
My iMac at start up has a blinking folder with a question mark on it. Iv done the option, command, p,r 2xs but it doesn't fix it.  Also I lost the loud up disc to reset the computer altogether.
iMac will not boot from internal hard drive or install DVD. It runs for a bit then displays a grey screen with file folder and a question mark. It will boot happily from a USB connected hard drive.
I sometimes receive a flashing folder with a question mark when I reboot. If I wait a little while and reboot again, my IMac will reboot successfully. My instincts tell me that my hard drive may be failing.
A few day ago I startup up my iMac and only a folder with a question mark was shown in the screen.Â
I boot from the Lion DVD, run disk utility but the only drive I get was the DVD and disk1/Mac OS X Base System.Â
I turned off the computer and next morning I turned on agian and this time with no problems, I use it for a few days with no problems but yesterday it happens again...Â
I do run disk utility again onlu turn it off, and this morning I tried to turn it on again, but the same foder appears...I run disk utility (get the DVD and disk1) and turn it off for a few hours.Â
What I should do ? Is there any 3rd party tools that I can try do use to solve this issue ? Â
PS: when the iMac started up with no problems I run disk utility and made a repair disk to the mac HD...
I have an aluminium cased iMac (2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo) running OS 10.6.8.Â
Recently I have found that sometimes the machine will not boot - I get the normal chime, grey screen and then the flashing question mark icon. I first noticed the problem a few months ago when restarting after a power outage had occured whilst I was using the Mac. After a couple of tries the machine booted and so I thought little more about it because in usual circumstances when the machine was shut down correctly it started as normal and behaved perfectly. However, after another power outage over the weekend the problem has become much worse.Â
I have tried all the usual things like trying to boot up in safe mode and recovery mode but with no success. The only way I can get the Mac to boot at all is to simply keep powering down and powering up again and hoping that it will spring into life. Once it does boot the Mac behaves perfectly.Â
I have an 10.6.8 universal system disk and I got the machine to boot from this disk. I then tried to perform some diagnostics on the hard drive (320Gb) but when I got to the pane that shows the available drivesthere was no drive to be seen.Â
After a lot of tries I have got it to boot off the hard drive since so, I have been able to back up files that weren't archived to an external drive.Â
My almost new macbook pro was showing a white screen with a flashing folder with a question mark. I was able to do the internet recovery, installing OS X on my external harddrive, but how do I use my mac without the harddrive plugged in?
My iMac (2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of Ram; 320 GB hard drive with 160 GB available) running OS 10.6.8 takes almost 10 minutes to boot up. Even opening a file folder can take almost a minute. I reset the PRam last week and that helped but now back to slow. I checked the Activity Monitor and I've got over 3 GB of ram free. Could my hard drive be dying? I have dual backup (external hard drive and Carbonite), so I'm not concerned about losing anything, but need this computer to work like it used too.
i am a new mac user and have a macbook where I think the harddisk is broken. When I start it up I see a folder with a question mark in it. If I start it up in target disk mode and connect it to another mac I only get the dvd drive mounted (if there is a dvd in the macbook). I have read that I can test if any hardware is failing with the dvd that came with my mac, but I cant find those DVDs. Can I download them or ask for replacements somewhere?
Today is my one week anniversary of owning a Mac so I am still very new to this. I made a folder in the stacks section of my dock. It is titled games. In the folder I put alias's of the two games I have so I can just click in there and quickly access my games.
It seemed to be working exactly as I expected until a few nights ago. I noticed that the folder has a question mark on it and when I clicked on it nothing happened. I removed the folder and re-made it and put the alias's in again. It worked again for a few days and then the same thing happened again. This time I did not remove the folder as I got busy with other things. Eventually the question mark went away, but still when I click on it nothing happens.
Did I do something wrong or is my system acting up somehow?
I recently purchased a Quicksilver machine from the original buyer. It came equipped with Panther. After getting it online I contracted a virus (should have loaded an antivirus program first). So I did a hard shutdown, since I couldn't close anything. When I restarted I went to options and made a bonehead move in selecting something that doesn't let me restart any farther than a "flashing folder with a Mac icon and question mark on it. How to rectify this?
I am getting the flashing mac folder with the question mark when trying to boot up. It started the reboot after I (unsuccessfully) tried to remove iTunes 8.2 so I could go back to 8.1. I was following some instructions from another site, but interpreted the code to be segmented and not to be entered as one large command. So I entered this into terminal while iTunes was still running. "sudo rm -rf /Applications/iTunes.app /System/Library". I think the system was hanging, so rebooted the computer and that's when this started. I can't enter single user mode, diskwarrior has rebuilt the directory successfully, but no luck. I'm on a 12" Powerbook 1.5GHz with 1.25 GB RAM, Leopard 10.5.7.
So i've been told the hard drive is fried so I get the restore disks and try that well i'm in the middle of the restore and it says select destination well I go to select the destination and there is no hard drive there. SO i'm guessing it's fried and needs to be replaced?
Basically, I hadn't used my MBP in a couple of days and it was sitting there in sleep mode and I thought nothing was wrong but I came to use it today and it had frozen so I restarted it only to have a flashing folder with a question mark appear.
I Googled around a bit and I thought that a quick repair disk in Disk Utility would fix it as it has for others but when I tried that I get this error:
Code:
Invalid B-tree node size.
Volume check failed.
Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.
This is a mid '09 Macbook Pro (specs in sig) so something going wrong with it was the last thing I expected, especially the hard drive.
I have a 13" Macbook that I bought when they first came out and upgraded to OSX a couple years ago. It's been running fine until a couple days ago when I turned it on and it was displaying a folder with a flashing question mark. I immediately went online to get suggestions for rememdies, but so far none of them seem to be working. When I insert the installation disc it gets recognized, but pretty much all options for reinstalling are grayed out. I hooked up my external hard drive that has my backups on it, but don't know what to do from there. Like many people, I haven't backed up my files for a few months, and there are docs in there that I'd prefer not to have to lose. I've noted that this seems to be a rather common problem.
