Hi Blitto, A flashing question mark at startup means your Mac is having trouble locating the system software.
Turn off your Mac by pressing and holding its power button for a few seconds. Press the power button once to turn your Mac back on. Then, hold down the Option key on your keyboard until the Startup Manager appears. Select your startup disk from the list of drives that appear on screen. If your computer finishes starting up normally, choose System Preferences from the Apple menu. Then, click the Startup Disk icon in the System Preferences window. Select your normal startup volume (such as Macintosh HD) from the list of drives that appear in the Startup Disk window. If your installation of OS X needs repair If you don't see your startup disk displayed in Startup Manager, or if you see a prohibitory symbol (⊘) appear, your startup drive may need directory repair, or OS X may need to be reinstalled. If you only see a disk named "Recovery HD" in Startup Manager, select it instead. You can also start from OS X Recovery by holding down Command and R on the keyboard at startup. From the Utilities menu, choose Disk Utility. In the Disk Utility window that appears, select your startup disk (usually named "Macintosh HD") from the left side of the Disk Utility window. Click the First Aid tab. Click Repair Disk to verify and repair any issues with your OS X startup disk. After repairing the disk, try to start up normally. If none of these steps resolve the issue, start from OS X Recovery and reinstall OS X. Cheers, Ronni Sent from Ronni's iPad4 > On 11 Oct 2014, at 5:49 pm, [email protected] wrote: > > Hi WAMUGers > My son-in-law to be's macbook pro, 3 yrs old, Mavericks, plenty of free disk > space, starts up and shows flashing question mark. > We've tried starting up with shift key and also with PRAM reset. No good. > Then we tried Target Disk mode, but the host mac still couldn't see his > powerbook, nor could Disk Utility on the host mac. > > He has an appointment with the Genius Bar on Wednesday. > > Does it look bad? > > ta > Blitto >
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