[RobOnTheCape]

Hello all,

My daughter just brought her mac home with her for the holidays, and showed me her cute blinking question mark at start up. She said it happened when she went to update Itunes, then followed suggestion to update her OS(10.4 I think). After the updates she got the blinking "?".

She has a white Intel mac which is a few years old.

What is the best course in this situation?

Thanks

[Eriamjh]

A ? means the EFI can't find a disk with the OS on it to boot from. Boot from the original CD and run disk utility, repair the disk & permissions, and see what's up. You may need a more powerful disk repair utility like Tech Tool Pro to actually fix whatever corrupted it.

Or worse, the drive could have failed. If you have an external HD USB or FW, boot to that and then clone the whole disk to it for a backup. She may have lost everything.

[RobOnTheCape]

Losing all of her work for this past semester would be tough. Try as I may to tell her about backing up she might find out the hard way why it's a good idea.

[EndlessMac]

Here is some info from Apple's website. It has additional links to further help.

If the drive has indeed failed then she will learn the hard way about why it's a good idea to backup. Sometimes the youth will only learn things the hard way.