[newsushi]

I recently installed Tiger (been using Panther) and have been having some strange startup behaviors that began after a week or so of having Tiger. When I turn on my machine, I get a blue screen with a picture of a folder with a ? on it. After a second, the ? goes away and it displays a graphic of the finder icon. After another second, the screen goes gray and the normal startup proceedures resume with the apple logo and spinning gear. Between the "Starting Mac OS X" screen and the normal deskstop screen, though, something else strange happens, the screen flashes different distorted colors several times before everything goes back to normal.

Anyone ever seen this before? It's something that doesn't seem to be doing any harm, but is really freaking me out since I just had a harddrive failure about 2 weeks ago. The only app that I installed before the happened was SuperDuper!, a cloning and backup tool that I used to backup my entire hard drive. Other than that, I've not done anything to the machine that I know of.

Thanks for any help you can provide

-NewSushi

[Big Mac]

No, I haven't really seen the second symptom before. The question mark icon at startup you're seeing indicates your Mac has not found its OS yet. You should open the Startup Disk pane of System Preferences and click on your hard drive to make sure it's selected. Given what you describe, more likely than not there are some problems with your installation of OS X. Unless the Startup Disk tip helps, I would boot from the OS X disc perform an Archive and Install.

[newsushi]

Thanks Big Mac. That actually fixed both problems. I know what happened now. SuperDuper! asked me if I would like to boot from my external drive after the backup was complete...which I did. I guess what happened, though, is that it permanently selected the external drive as the boot drive. I don't know how or why it would have fixed the second problem...but it did. Thanks again!

-NewSushi