sorry to tell you this, Jkephart1968, but you might be in trouble. That folder with the question mark on it means that your Mac can't find a valid system folder to start up from . It also might mean that your hard drive is failing. I'd ask if you had a backup system in place, eg "Time Machine" and did a recent backup, but something tells me it's a "no". Sadly, hard drives, all of them, can and do eventually fail, usually without much warning. You could try restarting from the Recovery Partition and running Disk Utility. To do that, reboot your computer, and hold down the Apple and R keys while it reboots. You should see a language selection screen. Choose your language and then continue. Disk Utility can be found in OS X Tools, which can be found by moving the mouse to the top center of the screen (it's sorta hidden, unless you know how to look for it, or how to find it). From there, run Disk First Aid and cross your fingers that it fixes the problem. If not, You may have to try to recover any data on the hard drive, or try a stronger method of recovery. Such things are not free. for stronger recovery you could try Disk Warrior (but no guarantees on that one) and for recovery, maybe Data Rescue 3. I don't work for any of the companies that make those applications, or for Apple. I'm just a user here same as you. Last resort, you could find an apple authorized service place, take in your computer, tell them what the problem is, and mention "data recovery". You'll have to pay their prices. I don't know what
model of imac, what year, or even what OS you're running, so my answer has to be general.
good luck to you
John B
