Blinking Folder with Question Mark

bimmertt said:

I have a 2009 Macbook Pro with the Toshiba 256GB SSD. OS is Lion. The computer froze on my yesterday and my only way out was a hard reset. Upon booting back up, I was taken to a gray screen and after a minute or so I got the blinking folder with the question mark. This is all it does now. I have tried almost everything I have found on the net and nothing is working.

The only thing that almost worked was when I pressed command + r upon booting up. This took me to the screen with the disk utility. I did a disk check and it mentioned that something was corrupted and then froze for a long time. I have not had any luck getting back to this screen.

The odd thing is that almost everything seems to be accessible through HFSExplorer when I connect the drive to my PC. I do get a lot of sporadic errors when I try to copy stuff over, but I was able to successfully retrieve files using this method. This has me wondering if the drive is really bad or could it possibly be something else such as the hard drive cable. I know my battery also needs to be replaced and I am wondering if that is contributing to this issue.

Before I spend money on a new battery, new HD cable, and possibly a new HD, I figured I would ask here as this can get quite expensive. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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I had a similar problem earlier this week. The spinning beachball came on and everything was unresponsive and so I had to shut it down using the power button. I tried to restart it but it couldn't go past the white screen. I tried the bootup CD (it took forever to load holding down the C key) but I still couldn't restore or reformat the disk.

I went to Apple for a Genius to take a look. He said it was likely due to a failing hard drive and after plugging in my MBP to their system and running some tests, we concluded that it was indeed a hard drive failure. He recommended a place for me to get a new hard drive along with the model number and everything.

I installed the new drive, formatted it (zero-ing it) and then went back to the Apple store where they helped me install my operating system using their network cable since it was faster than using the CD. And then after installing my Snow Leopard it asked if I wanted to transfer everything from my backup. Everything (all the settings and files, etc) now is exactly the way it was prior to the hard drive failure. Thank goodness for Time Machine.

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bimmertt said:

So much for SSDs being more reliable...

I just purchased a new HD. How do I get back up and running if I do not have the installation disk? How do I go about formatting the new hd? Thanks!

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