Flashing folder with question mark comes up at startup, HELP!

Reinstalling Lion Without Erasing the Drive

Boot to the Recovery HD: Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.

Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions: Upon startup select Disk Utility from the main menu. Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions as follows.

When the recovery menu appears select Disk Utility. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the main menu.

Reinstall Lion: Select Reinstall Lion and click on the Continue button.

Note: You can also re-download the Lion installer by opening the App Store application. Hold down the OPTION key and click on the Purchases icon in the toolbar. You should now see an active Install button to the right of your Lion purchase entry. There are situations in which this will not work. For example, if you are already booted into the Lion you originally purchased with your Apple ID or if an instance of the Lion installer is located anywhere on your computer.

Or for Snow Leopard:

Reinstall OS X without erasing the drive

Do the following:

1. Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions

Boot from your Snow Leopard Installer disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the installer.

If DU reports errors it cannot fix, then you will need Disk Warrior and/or Tech Tool Pro to repair the drive. If you don't have either of them or if neither of them can fix the drive, then you will need to reformat the drive and reinstall OS X.

2. Reinstall Snow Leopard

If the drive is OK then quit DU and return to the installer. Proceed with reinstalling OS X. Note that the Snow Leopard installer will not erase your drive or disturb your files. After installing a fresh copy of OS X the installer will move your Home folder, third-party applications, support items, and network preferences into the newly installed system.

Download and install the Combo Updater for the version you prefer from support.apple.com/downloads/.

What version of OS X?

Look at this if running anything other than Lion:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1440

gusthebus11 wrote:

...a flashing folder with a "?" appears. White screen.

When you see the flashing folder, it's the firware telling you it can't find the bootable drive/parittion that was set in startup items in system prefernces.

The white screen means your firmware that holds the grey screen didn't load, so it's no longer seeing the drive.

Normally if you hold the option key on a wired keyboard you'll get the Startup Manager and can reselct the OS X boot drive, but your getting gray screen on that so that's a more serious issue.

held the Alt key at startup and that just gets me to a gray screen with my mouse.

Usually the option/alt key will show a list of bootable options, but you have none or it's gray screen, so you have a serious drive issue.

however if the drive still works mechanically your data can be recovered.

 Data recovery efforts explained

I'm not too computer saavy so please let me know what I need to do! thanks!

Likely your drive is dead or you have another issue, could be hardware or software related.

Since your not computer savvy, your going to have to have it serviced and Data Recovery Efforts done.

If you have recent backups then no problem, they can swtich the drive and restore from that.

If not then perhaps you can get the old drive, use a adapter and read it when you get your drive replaced.

Read through these tips here, but if your not good with computers then your looking at having it repaired.

If you were good with computers, you could replace the drive yourself and do data recovery on the old drive.

https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro?view=documents

Are you selecting your internal drive volume? Usually it's called Macintosh HD. What version of OS X was installed on your computer? If it was Lion have you tried:

Boot to the Recovery HD:

Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.

That's the main drive entry. The volume enter should be just below it. If you don't see one then something is seriously wrong and you will need to repartition the drive (assuming the drive has not failed.) Again, did you have Lion installed or Snow Leopard? If you had Lion installed did you try booting to the Recovery HD?

Ahh, good. Do this to repartition the drive:

Drive Preparation

1. Boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.

2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.

3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.

4. Once formatting is complete quit DU and return to the installer. Reinstall Snow Leopard.

Only do this if you do not see any volume under the main drive heading. You are looking for something like this:

On your machine the Hitachi entry is like the OWC entry above. Your OS X volume would be like the Lion SSD entry above.

gusthebus11 wrote:

in the Disk Utility menu on the left side where I am supposed to select my "Macintosh HD" mine says "250.06GB Hitachi HTS545025B9SA02 Media"... is that a problem? I know when it was working fine the drive was just called Macintosh HD"

Before you do anything, if you need to understand your going to lose EVERYTHING, if you need to perform Data Recovery then STOP and either let someone else do it or follow here

 Data recovery efforts explained

If you have a recent backup of your data or your willing to sacrafice, then continue

Your Partition Map is borked, this gives directions to what partition information is on the drive, that's why you don't see "Macintosh HD" anymore, the only way to fix this is to reformat the enire drive.

Erase with Security option Zero All Data, will also map off failing sectors, which likely caused this issue to occur in the first place, then in the same process it will reformat the drive.

Then check the Partition: Option: GUID and Format: OS X extended journaled selected and applied if not so.

then quit and install 10.6 fresh, use the same name, Software update, install programs and return files from backup..

 Cheat sheet to help diagnose and fix your Mac

How to reinstall just OS X or erase/install OS X

 Most commonly used backup methods explained

Yes, it does. Follow the four step procedure which will hopefully get the computer working again. But any files you had on the drive are going to be lost. If you have stuff you need to recover, then you need to do something about that before you repartition the drive to recover your files:

General File Recovery

If you stop using the drive it's possible to recover deleted files that have not been overwritten by using recovery software such as Data Rescue II, File Salvage or TechTool Pro. Each of the preceding come on bootable CDs to enable usage without risk of writing more data to the hard drive. Two free alternatives are Disk Drill and TestDisk. Look for them and demos at MacUpdate or CNET Downloads.

The longer the hard drive remains in use and data are written to it, the greater the risk your deleted files will be overwritten.

Also visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on Data Recovery.

More than likely that means your hard drive has completely failed.