Flashing Globe

Hello hawsink,

The flashing globe signifies that your Mac is drying to boot from a network volume and not your Mac's internal drive. It still boots up normally because once it gives up trying to access a network volume with Mac OS X installed, it tries the next one in line, which happens to be your internal hard drive.

To change this, head to *System Preferences -> StartUp Disk*, and make sure your Internal Drive with Mac OS X installed is the selected volume and not the Network volume icon. See if that helps. 😉

B-rock

Hi

Yes. This means in the startup disk Preferences Pane in System Preferences you've probably mistakenly set this to look for a NetBoot Service. Going into the Preference Pane and selecting your internal hard drive will get rid of the 'problem'. You could also zap the Parameter RAM on start-up to 'reset' everything back to normal as well. On reboot depress the command alt+PR keys simultaneously. You should hear the boot chime. Keep the fingers depressed until you hear the boot chime twice more. Release the keys thereafter and let the mac boot normally.

Tony

I had to add my two cents on this. I had pretty much the exact same symptoms with 10.6.2 on my Mac Mini. However, the solutions listed here did not fix my problem. I also tried a few other things in Utilities with the hard drive and still no improvement. Any way, after I brought it into the Genius Bar it turns out the problem for me was a faulty keyboard. I guess the keys were stuck somehow so that on restart it was being told (through the stuck key) to boot in network mode. My new keyboard is on the way. I just thought I would share in case this can help anyone else trouble shoot things.