Question Mark Folder, and ejecting Startup Disk

Hi, I'm sorry if I get some of the terminology wrong here.

My computger shows the flashing question mark in a folder icon upon booting just after the chime. I've been reading up all about it and am pretty clear about what actions I should take.

The very first direction that all instructions give me is to insert the Startup CD, shut down, and then restart holding down the 'C' key. The problem I'm encountering is that a little while after starting up, the computer ejects the CD, and then goes onto show the flashing question mark again. I'm pretty sure i'm inserting the correct CD as it does itself have the directions to hold down 'C' for booting from CD printed on it. I've tried the other CD which came with my MacBook too, but the same result.

I've booked a slot with a Genius on Tuesday, but does anyone have any suggestions as to why it would be ejecting the CD?

Thanks.

p.s I've also tried to boot in target disk mode, and although the attached PowerBook sees the harddrive in disk utility, the repair utilities are greyed out, and it doesn't see it in finder so can't access the contents.

 

Hi, thanks for your advice. I'm not really sure what safe mode is, is it when you hold down shift as you boot up? I'm going to try booting off an external drive tomorrow.

It's in warranty, so it should hopefully be a free repair, but if I lose the HD, then... I'll lose 4 photoshoots, silly be for forgetting to back-up for a couple of weeks.

 

Sounds promising. Thanks so much for advice. I'll sleep a little easier tonight.

I'll let you know how it goes.

 

Well, so far I've tried doing a Safe Boot, by holding down the shift key just after the chime. It took a lot longer than usual, but eventually the plain screen was replaced by the flashing question mark folder. No luck.

My friend just tried booting it from an externmal firewire disk on which I have a disk image, and all it did was bring up a scary black screen with all sorts of MSDOS style writing. He took out the drive and now it's not looking so good. He's trying to re-build it using disk warrior. Strange stuff.


I'm just going to try some of those other options.

 

New development.

I put in the startup disk and didn't press any buttons, only the power button to turn off, and then to startup again. Without pressing C it went into the Disk Utility thing, after choosing my language.

Looking at the disk utility and trying to choose my startup disk has shown that the internal hard drive isn't showing up.

It's just not there!

Don't know what to do now.

 

I've reset the PRRam, I think. It chimed twice and I did what you said, but afterwards it just went to the same old grey screen - I turned it off after a couple of minutes.

Am now trying to boot from the Startup Disk again - after this I going to work and waiting till Genius on tuesday.

 

Ongoing. I think the fact that I'm posting so many problems means I should just wait for a genius, but I managed to gety the internal disk to show up in disk utility, and I ran a rapair disk.

"Verify and repair disk "disk0s2"
Checking HFS Pure volume
Invalid B-tree node size
Volume check failed.

Error: The underlying task reporrted a failiure on exit

1HFS volume checked
1volume could not be repaired because of an error"

Hmm... No idea what this means, but at least the disk showed up this time, this is after doing PRam reset.