Home Forums Hardware Mac Desktops & Notebooks MacBook Flashing "?"

My daughter, who is in another city, called to describe a problem with her MacBook.

1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo, System bus 667MHz
Hard Drive 80GB 5400 ATA

She turned off an application and got the spinning ball for an exceptionally long time. During that she heard a sound which she described as "...sounded like it was trying to flip something over".

She forced a shutdown by holding the power button.

On restart she got a Folder with a flashing "?".

Since then she's done the following:

Safe Boot (Shift key)
Reset PRAM (Opt-Cmd-P-R with two chimes)
SMC Reset (Remove battery, Hold power button 5 or 6 secs)

All three generated the same result - the Folder with flashing "?".

She does not have anything like Disk Warrior with her and she's out of tricks. Any thoughts?

I'll be gone for an appointment - back in about two hours. I've given her the FTM address.

ryck

Does she have a system disc? If so, she may be able to start up from that, and launch Disk Utility to see if the internal drive can be mounted. If it can be, she can run Repair Disk (from the First Aid tab), which may well not be able to solve the problem but should at least provide more specific information about what's wrong.

She has her original system disks but not with her. However, it turns out she's close to an Apple store and is there now waiting to be seen.

I'll let you know what she learns.

ryck

It turns out the hard drive has gone south. Fortunately she's paid attention to all my nags about backing up.

ryck

Could I get you to have a chat with my daughter? Maybe she would listen to you.

Actually, it was more than nagging. In the end, with both of my daughters, I did the heavy lifting (setting them up so that they had Time Machine in place and could do a Super Duper clone weekly). Once it was easy, they carried on. However, this recent event helps by demonstrating that all my "what if" scenarios were real possibilities.

ryck