[GStranks]

Hi guys, little bit scared here, I'm worried I've lost everything on my eMac... I'll tell you what's happened...

Just woke it from sleep to find that it wasnt displaying a mouse pointer. So, I shut down using the power button at the side.

Press the power button again to wake it up, goes into a plain grey screen - no apple, no spinning status circle.

This screen stays for a while but nothing happens.

So I shut down again using the power button.

Tried to start up again, same plain grey screen. I give it a little longer this time, and eventually I get a little blue folder with a flashing question mark (?) and square smiling face macintosh logo.

OK, so now I'm really worried. Have I lost everything? Whats happening? How do I turn it off? I'm very confused! Help! Please! I'll be online for a little while on my housemate's laptop, so any help you can offer would be GREAT.

[PHoynak]

The hard drive could be bad. The Mac is trying to find the boot volume and when it can't the flashing ? comes up. You can try and boot from the OS X CD/DVD and use the disk utilities and see if it finds any errors. If you have Disk Warrior you can try that. If you do get it running again I would back everything up at once. If you have Applecare call them.

[iDaver]

Like Phoynak said, try booting from the install CD that came with the computer. Holding your power button in for about six seconds will shut down the Mac. Then slip in the CD and hold the C key while starting up. Then run Disk Utilitiy and try a repair or verification of the hard disk.

[GStranks]

Well the nice man at AppleCare has sorted it out for the moment. Obviously the worry is that I have a bad drive at the root of it all. After a couple of shut downs and boot ups, its running normally, but I am going to do a full backup today just in case.

Thanks a lot guys. I'm still a bit of a Mac novice, only been using them for a year (never ever going back to PCs though) and get a little confused by them sometimes!

Thanks a million.

[PHoynak]

I had the same issue before on my eMac. It turned out to be the hard drive failing. The SMART test failed a week or so after Apple and I got it running. Back up your important data asap.