Mac book
A flashing ? basically tells you: ‘I do not have a boot system disk’, this often means the internal disk is damaged or, in rare cases, that its contacts are bad (sometimes connection may interrupt).
‘tried booting in target disk mode, appears to work’. Of course, your mac seems OK otherwise. If you connect two macs from the same generation, must be both intel macs, via a firewire cable, restart the healthy mac in target mode and your kid’s mac is pressed option/alt key after restart, wait, you should boot from the other mac; this is a good indication that your kid’s mac is OK, and that it needs a new disk or check whether contacts are bad.
You should also be able to boot from a boot system disk by pressing key C after chime, but note that it MUST be the original disk your mac included in its package or a generic (labelled ‘retail’) boot DVD. This will not work with another mac’s boot disk.
I do hope I was clear, if not please come back and tell me what was not clear. If you are familiar with booting a mac in target mode, you should be able to diagnosticate your ill mac quite easily. If a white or black MacBook, you can easily replace the disk by yourself, see instructions in ifixit.com or download Mactracker, identify your model, and follow the links there. Essentially, you must take battery off, unscrew the L-form metal fix on two sides, then pull disk out from the lateral side. You may first try to pull it out, clean contacts, put it back and see whether there is a simple connection problem (rare case, but not impossible). A better way to check disk is to put it into an external case, some are very cheap and is worth buying one, you may put any SATA disk there as a backup, external disk.
If your internal disk is indeed good, and is a problem of contact, buying a new disk and an external case is not a bad investment, you may use the disk as an external one. On this occasion you may upgrade your disk with a new generation one, SSD or, if more space is needed, with a rotational+SSD hybrid, they are cheap enough and, now, realiable.
Good luck.
I did the reverse target disk mode. and i am typing this from the Macbook now, but it is booted up via firewire from the desktop. i can see the macbook drive in the system profiler, but still not visible in the disk utility. and not visible from the desktop.
i checked the start up disk opptions in the system preferences. it does not see the Macbook drive either.
any other thought on how to get inside that drive?
thanks
steve
If not visible in the DU that disk does not exist for the system, as described
booting from another disk via fw in target mode, sys profiler reads the config of the boot disk, i.e. the other computer, not the config of the computer you work with. your mac and your system are those running the system, i.e. the other mac.
therefore, again: your disk is damaged or, at the best, has bad contacts. at this stage, you need not further check via target mode and firewire, you must now check the disk.
I know this is an older thread, however I just wanted to note to anyone who's reading this more recently that if you are having this problem a lot, then your boot drive is most likely failing. This happened to me and I reinstalled the OS (Mountain Lion) and had some success initially, but it's happening yet again and I have to get the hard drive replaced. I have Apple Care, but the hassle *****. Anyway, hope this helps anyone. You can check based on error codes you get in Console (if you know how to check on that) etc.
Just want to share this story.
I have a Mid2009 Macbook Pro (MBP) - model A1278
- Got the questionmark sign by starting up the laptop
- Disk Utilities didn't reconized the HDD
- Opened the MBP, removed the HDD, put it in a External Sata drive case
- Connected the drive via USB to the MBP
- Disk was reconized by Disk Utilities after starting up with Mac OS Dvd
- Repaired disk
- Put back the disk, but still question mark sign
- Called Icentre and they told me that the cable from the Mainboard to the HDD might be defective. The SATA driver on the mainboard hardly never fail (they told me)
- Purchased a new HDD cable via Ebay (nr 821-0814-A)
- Replaced the HDD cable to the original HDD and laptop restarted.
- Due to the fault, the HDD might have damages.
- I bought the following disk: Seagate Harddisk 2.5" 500GB, SATA300, Hybrid 4GB, ST95005620AS
Yesterday after all software installations I got all the time the spinning colored wheel, but today my MBP is working fine and I hope it stays like this.
Hope this info is helpfull for others who have the same problem as I had.
Most of the time you got the questionmark sign, you software is corrupted or your HDD cable is defect.
MBP Mid2009 can go up to a max of 500Gb (is what Icentre told me and is what you can find on the internet)
Succes!
please help me the computer still doesnt respond i tried everything please reply me fast i have work to do ps.my hard disk is not fried i think?
UMM my laptop is a school laptop and battery doesnt stay in im using tape at the moment to keep it in but when it freezes (THIS HAS HAPPENED TWICE INCLUDING TODAY AS THE SECOND) i shut it down manually then restart but then a blue question mark folder blinks BUT when i take battery out and put it back in then restart it runs fine. IS THERE A REASON WHY THIS HAPPENS????????????????????
its also being brought in somewhere soon i dont know when but just wanna know if theres an easy solution IT ALSO DOES A CLICKING SOUND WHEN STARTING UP and its not an expired hard drive because i had one just months ago on this exact laptop
another thing you can ask anything about apps that might cause this
Update to original post. Unplug everything, starting with power cord, ending with the ethernet cable while the question mark folder is flashing. Replug in everything in reverse order in which they were unplugged. It should restart without much of a hitch.
Holding down the option key worked. Thank you!!!
Hi!
So I did step #3 and I clicked disk utility. Then I clicked the disk that comes up on the left side of the window. It says to click repair and verify, but it won't let me click it.
Hi Matt,
I'm experiencing the fatal startup error.. question mark in a folder. The Shift Key, C Key and PRAM reset don't do anything, the Option Key tries to connect me to Apple's wireless support but fails after I connect to wifi.
Here is a picture of the Activity Monitor showing Terminal, Finder, and Chrome "Not Responding' before I tried to force close Chrome from Activity Monitor:
Here is a picture of the force close action that never finished (forcing me to reboot).
I'd love to hear whether you think this hard drive is toast or possibly salvageable.
Best Regards
Adrian
? = no system disk
In the hapy instance, a bad contact (rare instances), the most probable: bad disk; soluiton: replace it.
A simple way to test case is to connect two macs via firewire or thunderbolt, if there are (not all macs have FW) and start damaged mac in target disk mode (press T on startup), which turns it into an external disk. If no disk pops up on the good mac, the verdict is to at least check the disk, rather replace it.
You seem to know what you're talking about concerning this thread. I was deleting some photos off my Macbook earlier today and I got the pinwheel. Usually when something happens along those lines and the pinwheel wont go away I can get up to the Finder on the top right and manually Force Quit. That wouldn't work, which is odd because my computer has NEVER completely frozen like it was a PC, so I decided to shut it down. On startup I just got a grey screen. No pinwheel or apple logo, and definitely no folder with ?. I've tried the first two you said a dozen times. Nothing happens. Option doesnt work, T doesnt work. Unfortunately my CD drive has never worked so I cant do a disk start up. Upon writing this reply I now am looking at something on the screen that looks like a 'Y'. A circle in the middle, two lines on the bottom stem, two lines on the left stem, and a solid block on the right stem. No clue what that is. Please help!
question mark folder when i startup?
