Flashing Folder Icon on Startup

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Level 1

7 points

Flashing Folder Icon on Startup

I’ve spent the past few hours erasing, reinstalling and attempting to restore my macbook pro (2017). So a little background, my Mac randomly crashed after simple web browsing (specifically checking my cell phone bill) after I closed the lid like normal and went back to open and use it. I got the dreaded flashing folder icon. i looked up all the solutions I could find: Restore from back up (results in only 100mb restored and then going back to the folder icon), repairing and erasing disks, and reinstalling the OS (which also resorts to failing to resorting back to folder icon). Is there anything I missed? Thank you for your help!!!

Mike

MacBook Pro 15″, 10.15

Posted on Jun 5, 2020 7:16 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Barney-15E

Level 10

116,740 points

Jun 5, 2020 7:25 PM in response to acemtrx

A flashing folder can sometimes be recovered by resetting NVRAM. It just means that it cannot find the startup volume. That information is stored in NVRAM.

However, if you have done all of that and get fairly immediate failures, my guess is the drive is failing.

Boot into Recovery (maybe Internet Recovery at this point) and use Disk Utility to run First Aid a couple of times.

Make sure you set it to Show All Device from the View popup menu and select the actual device. At the bottom, look at the SMART status.

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