HT204323: If a flashing question mark appears when you start your Mac

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janefromrobertson

Q: What caused the flashing question mark of death?

I bought my Macbook in 2010 and it has served me well for the last five years.  Admittedly it has been running a little slow the last few months.  But then it got the flashing question mark.  I followed the directions on what to do and couldn't solve the problem so I took it to an Apple Service Provider who told me I would have to replace the hard disk.  As it's five years old I thought it best to skip that and just get a new computer.  It was very sad because I'd lost a few things that I'd worked on recently that weren't backed up and a few things that I thought were backed up but weren't, but overall the damage was minimal.  It just seems a little crazy to me that a computer can be working one day and completely gone the next with no way of retrieving anything.

 

I'd backed things up but lots of people don't and would expect at least some kind of warning or way of collecting their data, not to mention the fact that I now have no computer all of a sudden.  I'm sure there were some warning signs, but not being a technical person I probably didn't notice them.  But as mentioned it was a  great five years and I am considering buying another one (which might seem silly when thinking about how the last one went).  I just want to know what may have caused such a disastrous problem so it doesn't happen again, or what were the warning signs that I should have noticed?  Would there have been any??  Does this still happen on current models?

MacBook

Posted on May 31, 2015 6:31 PM

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Q: What caused the flashing question mark of death?

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  • by Kappy,

    Kappy Kappy May 31, 2015 6:43 PM in response to janefromrobertson
    Level 10 (270,190 points)
    Desktops
    May 31, 2015 6:43 PM in response to janefromrobertson

    The average life of a HDD is 3 years. Yours lasted 5 years. It got old. You can't prevent it. It can happen on newer models even though they use SSDs with no moving parts, but electronic components also fail without warning. It's no big mystery.

  • by dalstott,

    dalstott dalstott Jun 1, 2015 5:55 AM in response to janefromrobertson
    Level 4 (2,625 points)
    Jun 1, 2015 5:55 AM in response to janefromrobertson

    I have had several HDD failures both on Macs and PCs over the past 25 years. All were unexpected and if any warning signs were present I missed them.

    The only way to prepare is to have adequate back up of your data. I use two backups, both Time Machine and a bootable clone as one time a backup drive failed. This overkill has saved me a lot of distress in dealing with drive failures.