Blinking Globe on Startup

[R.Youden]

just found this on my MBP and dont have the faintest idea what it means! I booted my machine up at night so it was dark and I wanted to dim the screen so I pressed the screen brightness down button (F1) whilst on the grey screen. It then came up with a flashing globe for a few seconds and then the globe just sat there for about 30 seconds until the Apple logo appeared and the machine booted as normal. Can't see anything different on my machine. Anyone know what this was and more importantly what it may have done to my mac? Thanks.

 

[SeVeN]

sounds like the Network startup disk. you can change that in preferences, change it back to Mac OS X

 

[Hello Contrast]

did you ever figure out what this was about?
the exact same thing happened to me this morning on my MacBook (not the pro though).

it was pretty early and i didn't want to wake up my boyfriend so when I turned it on I quickly tried to dim the screen by pressing F1 a few times and the globe came up instead of the apple. it just kept blinking so i held the power button down to see if it would shut off and then when it did i just turned it back on and the apple came up and it started up normally. everything seems to be running exactly the same now.

 

[Sky Blue]

It would have been looking for a network drive to boot off. When it couldn't find it, it would've loaded as normal.