Some advice please.....

[MunkyMan]

Hello,

My wife and I have an imac DV and when we went to restart the computer the other day, instead of the "happy mac" screen we got a grey screen with a folder in the middle and a question mark that was flashing on and off the screen.

Can anyone tell me what this means?? We eventually were able to log back on by zapping the p ram (option+apple key+p+r) but I am curious to know what was wrong with it.

Thanks

Mike

[cpjakes]

That's what that blinking question mark icon means. A setting in your PRAM was probably messed up, looking at an incorrect location trying to find the startup disk. But resetting the PRAM will fix this, although I always go to the Startup Disk Control Panel and manually reselect it just so that it knows where to look.

You could run Disk First Aid on it and see if there's anything else, but I doubt it.

cpjakes

[dragula53]

I think that means a bad boot block

heh

have you tried to run disk utility from a cd yet?

do you have applecare?


fsck -l?

if not you might be up assy creek and have to reload

[MunkyMan]

Like I said, I did the PRAM thing and it booted fine. I don't have the disk care thing. I tried last night to boot it from the software restore disk, but that did nothing. Thanks for the advice. I'm just confused about why this happend. It just seemed so out of the blue.

[the Natetrix]

It could be that your physical harddrive isn't mounting, which means that it is a hardware issue. This happened to me once, I ran diskwarrior, it found all my data but I couldn't access it through the volume or through a boot disk. If this is similar to your case you may have to install a new Hard drive. Or at least try to get the old one fixed. Sorry man. Applecare = best 250 I ever spent, and thats the best advice I can give