[Bilemshious]

whenever i restart or just boot up before the grey apple screen comes up there is a screen that has a blue folder with the finder logo on it for a brief second. it only stays up that long then goes to the apple screen. it only started doing this recently. is it something i should be concerned with? what's it all about?

[Big Mac]

When you see something like this, it's usually because you haven't selected your startup drive in the Startup Disk pane of System Preferences. Your drive may have been deselected if you used Startup Disk to boot from another drive for some reason - the system doesn't automatically reselect your regular drive. Back in the classic Mac OS era, such behavior could also have indicated some sort of OS corruption, but I've never heard of that with OS X.