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What does the "prohibited" symbol at startup mean?

Is the "prohibited" symbol at startup similar to the old "sad mac" icon at startup in that it sees a hard drive, but just cannot find a usable operating system on it? This is on a current model MacBook Pro (non-retina, 2.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i7).


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Posted on Jul 13, 2012 8:12 AM

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Posted on Jul 13, 2012 8:15 AM

That means something is seriously wrong with the system, and it's preventing the machine from starting up. There's some information about this, as well as troubleshooting techniques, here:


http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1411

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What does the "prohibited" symbol at startup mean?

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