My Macbook won't reboot. Have a flashing folder w/ a ? in the middle. HELP

[kenyawill]

Ok guys,

Yesterday my Macbook started acting funny and several programs started freezing. I went into the finder and force quit the browser and a few programs like entourage and mail. I was still having problems so I shut the computer down to reboot. When I turned it back on, the little thing just kept spinning for about 5-10 minutes. I turned it off again, removed the battery, cordless mouse, power cord for a minute and reconnected everything except the cordless mouse. Now then I book up the computer, I get this flashing folder in the middle of the screen with a question mark in the middle. I have no idea what this means and can't seem to find anything on the mac site making reference to it. My apple care JUST EXPIRED and I am trying to troubleshoot it before taking it into the Mac Store to pay a fortune to get it to work again.

HELP PLEASE.

 

[eman]

Looks like your hard drive is dead. The macbook can't find the startup files. Can you swap another macbook hard drive and test your macbook?

 

[richard.mac]

your Mac cant find its startup disk.

try booting while holding option and then selecting the startup disk OS X is on.

if this doesnt work boot into your first install DVD and repair your disk using Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. if you dont have your first install DVD follow the directions to run 'fsck' here.

if this doesnt work try zapping the PRAM using the directions in the link above.

lastly if none of this works your hard drive is probably dead. luckily MacBooks are relatively easy to upgrade their hard drives so you can just buy a new one.

 

[kornyboy]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419.3)

Unfortunately I believe that your HD has gone bad. One way to verify is to put your OS X install disc in and boot off it. Then run disc utility. If disc utility can't find the drive or if it says that it has major issues and cannot be repaired then the drive is dead. If your Apple Care is gone and you want to try to fix it I would not suggest taking it to Apple to fix. They are really high because they charge the same price for the HD that they would have charged when the computer was new. Find out what kind of drive you need and replace it yourself. I did my old PowerBook for a little over $100. There are plenty of sites out there that will walk you through exactly how to do it.

Good Luck