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chehalistech

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 27, 2003
9
0
I have a EMac that displays a broken folder on startup. It won't boot anything. There is no error message, only a broken folder. CD's won't even boot. Anyone know how to fix it?
 
To me, this sounds like software corruption. Broken folder usually means it started to try to boot the machine, but then something went wrong, usually corruption.

Zap the PRAM by booting with apple-option-p-r held down, till you hear the boot tone at least 3 times, then follow these instructions:

Hold C to try to boot off the CD again, with fresh PRAM.

If that fails reboot again holding Apple-Option-Shift-Delete down, this will tell the comptuer to only try to boot from the CD drive, even if it does not think it is bootable.

If this fails, it can possibly still be software corruption on that drive.
I then suggest that you take it into a repair shop, because physically getting to that hard drive is a pain that you don't want to ever experience.
 
Start from the OS 9 disk and rebuild the desktop on the drive (command-option before desktop appears or as icons dance across bottom), run disk first aid, and then switch over to OS X and run fsck -y, and disk first aid.

Remember if any of these find an error, keep running it until it finds none.

As a last resort try unplugging it (or turning off the power strip) and then starting, or hitting the PMU reset switch (just one time after grounding yourself).
 

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I have tried the PMU button and it did nothing. I can't even boot into OS9 off the harddrive. The internal CD won't boot. Right now the only thing that I can boot off of is an external CDRW using firewire. And I can't boot the OSX cds. I got the 9 cd to boot and rebuilt the desktop. Nothing changed. I ran my Norton cd and the only problem that could not be fixed was that it said it had multiple system folders. But still it just shows a broken folder when started. Any more help? I don't even know what would cause this error.
 
Try booting from Open Frimware.
hold down "command o+f" on startup i dont know if this works for osx or not but its worth a try..
if it does work type
boot cd
or boot cd\\cdname
i forget wich

aethier
 
easy fix

I have had this happen. What you need to do is... Boot into os 9 during restart. Then when you get to the os 9 desktop, go to the control panel and select your start up disc to be OS X. It sounds like it may be confused as to what startup disc you want. Have you been using os 9 a lot? It is no big emergency. Don't panic.
 
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