[inEarNest]

I had this happen on my TiGigaBook tonight running 10.2.3. Freaked me out. I couldn't boot at all into my HD, so I tried holding down "Option"--didn't work, then "X"--didn't work, so then I rebooted holding down my "C" key with my OS X disk and ran disk utility from it. It found three or four problems which were immediately repaired when I chose the repair option, then I rebooted and it was fine. I didn't write down what the errors were, so I can't say what they were. I should've--might've helped diagnose later.

Nothing was out of the ordinary at all before I shut the computer down. I haven't even installed anything new for a couple weeks. I just shut it off because I wasn't planning on using it for a couple days. I properly shut it down (Apple menu-->Shut down...), and nothing was weird at all, but then I needed it back on, so I turned it on and got the blinking question mark folder. That means it's searching for a boot disk, right?

Once I got back up and running (nothing was lost, thank goodness), I did a search on these forums for this issue, and found a lot of people who've had it happen to them, but not many explanations as to why. Anyone know causes?

Thanks!

-sae

[ASIMO]

Yeah. Alzheimer's. OS X is what, 2, 3 years old? That's ancient in computer life.

But seriously. Your boot directory or whateveritscalled was probably corrupt. Or it just freaked out. Which in turn freaked you out, which didn't really help the situation. But alas, you did the right thing. You are a good man. Go have a cookie and milk and you sleep well, you hear?

[Mastrap]

You did the right thing but it should not have happened in the first place.

I'd go and buy a copy of Disc Warrior, the finest disk utility on the market IMO. Run it once a month and it should keep your disk as healthy as it possibly could be.

Also, this illustrates once more the importance of frequent backups.

[ngrundy]

the blinking question mark folder is OpenFirmware trying to locate a bootable device. I know quite a few iMacs running OS9 (bleh) at a college i do work for every now and then drop the system folder, you need to do the magic rebless trick and it's all good again, but that's os9 for ya.

[waterbuck]

The blinking question mark is the Mac saying either "can't find the drive" or "can't get located correctly on a clearly-interpretable piece of your hard drive directory"

In my case, this happened because of what was probably a mechanical failure of the hard drive itself. Disk Warrior could not find my hard drive. Drive10 sort of found my hard drive, but after running it through 3 repair cycles for problems with the main node, the computer was still unbootable and unreadable, even in target mode from another mac, and my computer is now at Apple to get looked at.

Anyway, I agree that DiskWarrior is a good program to use, but it wont fix a mechanically problematic drive.

[JustinD]

Your BootX file could have been crunked up. When I got my 12", the first thing I did was throw on a new theme. The theme modified the BootX... problem was the 12" shipped with a newer build of the OS, so when I restarted, I got the blinky folder. After another time of reinstalling it, (with a theme), and getting the blinky folder again, I was all set to send it back to Apple (they were also convinced it was hardware...)

Then I remembered that whole BootX file. So I reinstalled, and installed a theme without it's BootX resource, and all is good. Voila! I let Apple know, and they actually said it is kinda silly that the modification of one file requires a whole new reinstall (since that file is invisible, it's not easy for the average user, or even above-average user, to go in and replace it...)