wonderings

So I have seen this before in my OS9 days. I had this happen to my MBP current 15inch version with SL. Everything worked as it should until yesterday. When I booted up I get the flashing question mark/folder icon on startup. Today, it starts up normal as it should. Is this a sign of a bad drive or something corrupt in there? What should I be checking or looking at now that it is running normal?

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“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” Bishop Desmond Tutu

yoyo

The last time I had the question folder my HD was dead and would not come back to life. I think it may also be a corrupt system. Use Onyx to check the SMART status of the drive and also to check your system.Back up as well.

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wonderings

I do have a time machine backup, so I wouldnt lose anything. Going to run onyx now and see what it says.

__________________
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” Bishop Desmond Tutu

rgray

The flashing "?" literally means that the computer can't find a 'blessed' system folder. If it can't find it where it found it before - ie. your harddrive - it implies something wrong vis a vis the harddrive. You may be able to correct this by booting from a machine-specific disk or a retail OS install disk, and running "Repair" in Disk Utility. On the other hand, your HD may already be toast....... Backup????

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"..not all those who wander are lost.." j.r.r. tolkien

eMacMan

This is the sort thing that DiskWarrior handles well assuming the HD is OK.

A free trick that is surprisingly effective is to boot from the original install disk, go in to the menu items and click on "Start-up Disk" (Might be "Select start-up disk"). Pick your regular HD. This is the equivalent of re-blessing the HD, that is telling the computer where to find the stuff it needs to boot.

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wonderings

When this issue occurred yesterday, I tried holding down "option" to see if I could boot into my Win 7 partition. Nothing came up at all giving me an option to select my startup disk. Shouldnt that work even if OS X was messed up?

__________________
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” Bishop Desmond Tutu

rgray

Yeah, but it won't work if it is the drive that is messed up.

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"..not all those who wander are lost.." j.r.r. tolkien

GlassOnion

You may try to boot the MBP holding the command S keys until you see a black screen with white text then type:

fsck -fy (don't forget the space between the k and the -)

then push on the RETURN key

The computer will scan the OS and check if there's a system software issue and will try to repair it. When the issue will be repaired you'll get the message:

The volume (HD's name) appears to be OK.

You could have to repeat the fsck -fy procedure until you get this message.

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wonderings

This morning it did the same thing again. I just did a reinstall from time machine. Hope that fixes the problem. If it happens again I will try your suggestion GlassOnion. Thanks all.

__________________
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” Bishop Desmond Tutu

wonderings

This does not load, only if I have the sl disc in the drive, and then it checks the disk. Can this be a hardware problem or is it more likely to be software related?

__________________
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” Bishop Desmond Tutu