OS X :: Flashing Question Mark And Cannot Boot From Install Disc
Nov 6, 2009
My iBook G4, 1 GHz, 1.2 G RAM white plastic 2 USB purchased 2004 refuses to boot. When I try to use the startup disc, I get the "You need to restart your computer." message. The HD was replaced 2 years ago after a fatal crash. Has it happened again? That repair at an authorized dealer was so expensive I'll be halfway to a new laptop if I go back. I have been able to get it up 3 times since the problem started, so I suspected kernel panics or RAM problems. But not been able to run disc utilities--it just stares at me. Now can't get it to boot at all.
Problem: When I boot up my Macbook, I get the flashing question mark. Failed Solutions: I booted using the Install disk and went to Disk Utility. The hard drive was not mounted.I reset the PRAM. I noticed that the Mac startup sound goes on now, but the same problem (question mark) persists. I went to Disk Utility again. HD still not mounted. I held the option key when booting to go to the Startup Manager. The mouse pointer appears on a grey screen, now, but nothing else What do I 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...
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
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???
I dont know the password to a MAC G5 I bought. I have a G4 install disc and two white install discs witha leapord skin X on them one says install disc 1. the G5 wont boot to the install disc when I push the C key. I have reset the PRAM 1, 2 and three cycles. It wont boot to the G4 disc either. Disc is version 10.2
My imac locked up on me the other day while watching a DVD. There were a few lines and splotches on the screen in various colors and the system just became unresponsive. I rebooted and the system came right back up, but when I started the DVD, it immediately crashed again. After that point, every time I tried to boot, it went straight into kernel panic (You must restart your computer message).
I tried resetting the PRAM, but that didn't help. I also did the hardware diagnostic test (hold D during boot) and that said everything was OK.
I was able to boot from the CD. After a few unsuccessful attempts at restoring the OS from backup, it finally worked. Previous tries only resulted in the system locking up. Once I finally got everything running again, the system worked great. I worked it pretty hard in the next 24 hours after fixing it. No problems during use. Then I left for a few hours and came back to LOCKED UP COMPUTER AGAIN! Same squiggly lines on the screen.
Now I can boot into the hardware diagnostic test if need be. However, I can't boot into the computer any other way. Booting from hard disk, installation dvd/cd, and even Safe mode all cause a kernel panic. Also, I might add, that I had all peripherals unplugged from the machine and still got the kernel panic messages.
Any ideas? Closest Applestore is 3 hours away. The closest private licensed repair place is 60 miles away. I called Apple Support and they pretty much blew me off because My AppleCare was up about 6 months ago and I'm sure this would be a hard case to do over the phone. They suggested I take it in to get looked at.
I want to format my macbook pro and reinstall osx Problem is, i can't boot up the machine via the install disc I've tried holding down the c key, i've tried holding down the options key and selecting install disc. Just loads forever until screen turns black.
Disk utilities says I need to boot from the install disc, but I can't get my computer to boot up from the install disc. I tried holding down the C key (the letter C), both lower and upper case, but it still boots off the hard drive. Is there a special way I am supposed to initiate the reboot? I just hit the power button to bring up the little window that has buttons for Restart, Sleep, Cancel, and Shut Down. So I held down the C key and clicked the restart button. I also held the C key till the sign-on menu came up. I am running Leopard.
I have an aluminum macbook, from made around January 09. The issue is I need to repair the hdd using the osx install disc. The problem is that when I try to do so, boot using the disc, it just restarts to the hdd, it will not boot from the disc. I try holding c and I have tried setting the disc as the startup disc and it just goes in this never ending circle of restarting and restarting. I've never seen this before.
My MacBook won't turn on. I hear the noise (not from the speakers but from the inside, like the hdd or something) but nothing shows up on the screen. I tried to boot from the Mac OS X install disc, but now the disc is in there and not coming out, and when I turn the computer on i hear the cd/dvd drive instead of hard drive.Still nothing on the screen. This is a follow up to the behavior I described in this topic:[URL]
I have a uMBP 2.26GHz with 4GB and 500GB HDD. I usually do the Disk Utility every once in a while and it recommended me to use the MAC OS X disk and repair the disk. I inserted the disk, restarted and held "C" and the disc was running and everything. Like 1 minute later my display went black but I can still hear the disc running. But that's all it happens. Everything runs but my display went black. This is a 3month old uMBP. This is the log from the Disk Utility
Verifying volume "Macbook Pro HD" Performing live verification. Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume. Checking extents overflow file. Checking catalog file. Missing thread record (id = 782820) Missing thread record (id = 962550) Incorrect number of thread records Checking multi-linked files. Checking catalog hierarchy. Invalid volume directory count (It should be 54635 instead of 54637) Checking extended attributes file. Checking volume bitmap. Checking volume information. The volume Macbook Pro HD was found corrupt and needs to be repaired. Error: This disk needs to be repaired. Start up your computer with another disk (such as your Mac OS X installation disc), and then use Disk Utility to repair this disk.
i'm trying to boot from the Snow Leopard install disc so I can format my drive and re-install, however... it just gets stuck on the white screen with the grey Apple logo, what's up with that?
So i have a mac Pro octo from May 2007. I upgraded to the 8800GT when they came out and not have any problems since. Today I encountered some problems with my hard drive and am trying to boot from either my Mac Pro Install disc or my Leopard Install disc and get an error everytime. When I try and boot from the disc it gives me an error and tells me i need to reboot. I have found out through the apple discussion forums that Leopard Discs before 10.5.2 do not have the drivers for the 8800GT, and therefore will not let you boot. What am I to do here. Is there any way I can get a newer leopard install disc? It seems I am going to have to reinstall an Ati X1900 to get my own install discs to work. This is really annoying to me, this is an awful design flaw. How do they expect you to upgrade your mac pro and not have problems like this.
so I have a very unique, bizarre problem. A friend brought her G4 1.67gHz 15" Powerbook to the office to have it looked at as it wasn't working properly. I took a look at it and found that one of the RAM chips was shorted out. I took it out and ordered her a new pair (since it was like $26 for 2gb, and with the one removed she was running on 512). Here's where it gets bizarre: I installed the new RAM and it was freezing regularly. I then took one out and it was still freezing regularly. I booted it from my Utilities partition (I have a bootable firewire drive set up to fix problems and recover data) and ran Disk Warrior, TechTool, and a whole heapin helpin of other fixin and optimization apps. I got it to fix all the reported errors, TechTool reports no hardware errors, everything should work perfectly. So now, the laptop boots to a blue screen. I can't boot it from a retail Tiger install disc, and I can't boot it from the hard drive, it just boots to the Apple logo, the Unix spinner, and then goes blue and freezes. So I set it as a firewire target drive and was able to do an archive/install of Tiger using my G5. It recognized and installed fine and it booted my G5. Ok, so it's not the drive. I restart and nothing, apple/unix logos then blue screen. Same with the Tiger DVD. I replace the original 512MB stick (the working one) and still same result. So finally I go back to my Firewire repairs disc and everything boots fine, all tests come out fine, drive is recognized and works fine, etc. What could cause a computer to boot, a drive to be bootable, but a computer not being able to boot on any installed drive?
My Macbook is starting to get really slow. I've tried Onyx and it told me that the startup volume had to be fixed. But I can't boot my install DVD by pressing "C" in the startup.
I got my new Macbook today. I've reformatted and installed Snow Leopard. Then I set up Boot Camp and installed Windows 7. I installed all the drivers under Windows 7 using the Snow Leopard install disc. One problem that remains is under Windows 7, I can't tap the trackpad to click. I have to use a mouse.Anyone know of a fix? Can't find it under Apple Support at all.
I bought a Mac OSX 10.6.3 Snow Leopard CD (Family Pack) to upgrade on my Macbook Pro, but it won't boot. There are sound like it was running but it reject in the end. My Macbook Pro is Intel Core Duo 2GHz with 2GB Ram. It is currently running OSX 10.5.8. I tried the disc on other Macbook running 10.6.6 purchased 2-3 years ago and it work. So I don't really know what happen with mine. My DVD drive work fine though.
Boot camp went wrong because I had to reboot my macbook while windows 7 was being installed. After that, I deleted the 32gb windows partition. But guess what? Disk utility says that my free space is 468 gb, when before boot camp I had 493gb.
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.
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'm having the same problem, which I start-up my mac with the flashing question mark, but when I open the disk utility I don't have the Mac OS disk. I've only dvd-rom and "media" to choose. What can I do..
I searched the entire internet for this solution. I realize it has been posted but the symptoms were note entirely the same. I have a 1.6 g5. One night it was running awfully slow. I shut it down and didn't touch it for the weekend. When I came home the finder/? Thing flashes. Unlike some of the others, mine never boots and I don't have my discs to run the utility. Does this seem like a hard drive problem or am I looking at apples infamous logic board failure?
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.
2.0GHz MacBook running 10.5. My friend's computer which he brought to me thinking I might be able to get it booted.
My buddy went to bed last night, running a video on his hard drive with the computer hooked up to his flat screen TV, he fell asleep while it was playing. This morning he woke up to a frozen screen. He did a manual shutdown. Upon restart he got a gray screen with nothing showing.
I have tried the original installation disk and restart while holding down "C" with no result.
I tried a copy of Tech Tools 5 in the DVD drive... with no result.
I have tried booting off of my own external firewire HD upon which I keep a bootable clone of os10.4.11... with no result.
I tried booting off that same external HD while holding down "C" and got the flashing folder with question mark.
I tried using a firewire cable and starting the bad macbook in target mode while hooked up to my old iBook. This caused the macbook screen to show a firewire symbol and nothing showed up on my iBook screen but an archive... Tech Tools on my iBook recognized the archive but could not Unmount the archive when I tried to use any of the tools to explore or fix the target disk.
I know that the flashing question mark indicates there is no start up software to be found, but I have to question whether this might not be something more than a bad HD. Anyone have any suggestions?
BTW... the macbook is out of warranty. My friend just went ahead and ordered a new macbook pro so there is no pressing need to get this fixed in a hurry, but he would like to get the old computer fixed if it is just a matter of replacing an HD.
I have a Macbook OS X. This just happened when I turn on my Mac it goes to a folder with a flashing question mark. I don't know how to fix this so I just want to restore it. I have my Mac OS X disk in automatically tries to upgrade to v10.5 and when I put it in it asks what language and I click English and then after a minute it says Mac OS X v10.4 or later cannot be found on your computer. So how do I restore it to factory settings?
I have a 13" macbook purchased 2007 just out of the extended protection plan this summer. Last night while watching a video in full screen it froze with the beach ball for over 20 minutes with no sign of stopping. I had my external WD drive hooked up which is my iTunes drive (only). I had to manually shutdown the computer (with external still hooked up) After trying to reboot I got the flashing question mark and continue to get it no matter what I do.
I've removed the external drive, reset the PRAM, tried booting in safe mode, tried booting from installation disc but my hard drive doesn't even appear in disk utility. Not sure what else I can try as nothing has worked.
