Blinking question mark folder?

Question

Level 1

0 points

Blinking question mark folder?

So I recently installed rEFInd on my 2007 imac, running OSX 10.6.8 and got Kali Linux up and running just fine. I booted it again and got through the installation with no problems until I got to the partition part. The only option was something called ATA so I used that. It got about 1/20 through erasing it after a few hours and I gave up, canceled it, and shut the computer down. When I turned it on this morning I got a grey screen for a few seconds followed by a flashing folder with a question mark in it. I tried turning it on again with the option key held down, and this time got the grey screen with a cursor. It's still like that. I'm afraid to turn it off and mess it up more. What should I do? I have no OSX install disk as well but I have a thumb drive that supposedly has a bootable version of Kali on it.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Dec 16, 2015 5:10 PM

Reply

Answer 1

a brody

Level 10

82,965 points

Dec 16, 2015 5:23 PM in response to tailor1607

I would contact Kali support. The question mark disc basically means it can't find an operating system. This can either be due to an improper installation, a bad directory, or a bad hard drive, or a bad interface to the hard drive.

ATA is the interface connecting the hard drive. It is important to note there are two ATA types used most frequently Parallel ATA/IDE, and SATA. SATA is built-in to every 2007 iMac's internal hard drive connector. the old Parallel ATA/IDE drives sometimes are coupled with SATA ports on the same drive. The other thing to note, is that some Macs will not speak to newer SATA drives if their firmware does not allow them to downstep to the slower SATA of iMacs that are old.

Reply