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You are here: MacNN Forums > Hardware - Troubleshooting and Discussion > Mac Notebooks > Question mark (?) folder, smiley folder icon at startup - problem?

Question mark (?) folder, smiley folder icon at startup - problem?
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funkboy
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Jan 3, 2006, 12:36 PM
 
My 700 MHz iBook G3 has been showing a few things on startup recently. After pressing the power button:

1) A folder icon with a question-mark (?) appears in the middle of the all-grey screen, almost like back in the Mac OS 9 days
2) The question mark goes away and then changes to the smiley Mac OS Finder logo - that face is now superimposed on the folder icon
3) The regular pure white screen with grey Apple and spinning circle come up

This is on Mac OS X 10.3.2.

Does this mean anything is going really wrong with the computer? The hard drive is not dying or anything, is it?
     
bradoesch
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Jan 3, 2006, 12:47 PM
 
Nope, it just means your iBook is looking for a disk to boot from. If you go into System Preferences->Startup Disk you can select the right disk to boot from and it won't look at startup anymore.
     
funkboy  (op)
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Jan 3, 2006, 02:45 PM
 
Hooray! Wonderful news, I'll fix it. Probably time to update that to 10.3.9 as well, eh? That could only help my computer, right?
     
bradoesch
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Jan 3, 2006, 04:33 PM
 
Upgrading is a good idea. Any issues with that upgrade were discovered, well, a long time ago!
     
   
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