Richard, Good thing you had a good back up.
I am not sure that 'Folder with ? Mark" after the hard restart mean that the the drive had gone bad. When you boot up any Mac, the first part of the boot process is contained in the EFI, Extensible Firmware Interface. Check out this link for a complete explanation, <http://www.intel.com/technology/efi/> The system then tries to read a BootRom file off the hard drive. If it can't find the Bootrom file, you get the Folder/? Mark. The first thing I do when the Folder/? Mark shows up, is boot from an alternate device, either the Install DVD that came with the system, a Retail Install DVD for the verison of the MacOS you are using, or a FireWire diagnostic disk. I have two FireWire diagnostic disks (I am a full time Mac Consultant), one for PPC, 10.3, 10.5, 10.5 and one for Intel, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6. I run Disk Utility, Repair Disk, Repair Permissions. You can also check the SMART status ( Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology ) of the drive. If the drive is in failure mode it will be reported. I also have the latest version of Disk Warrior on the the FireWire drives, which I use to rebuild the disk directory. After you run all of these tests, without any non-repairable issues, re-boot the system. If may take a little longer to start up because of the journaling that is part of all the drive formats. You should be back to where you where short of any lost data do to the hard reboot. I hope this was helpful and will come in handy the next time you get the Folder/? Mark Regards, Len Levin Business Systems Consulting Wakefield, MA 01880 781-683-4040 > Message: 8 > Date: Tue, 29 Dec 2009 17:22:03 -0600 > From: Richard Kriss <[email protected]> > Subject: Back Up Lesson Learned on Christmas Eve > To: YouTalk <[email protected]> > Message-ID: <c75feb3b.b8e1%[email protected]> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > > Off topic to Entourage but may be of interest to the group. > > The good news and bad news is mixed bag. On Wednesday evening > 23-Dec, I was moving a file and encountered a major screen freeze. > The freeze was so hard the OS X Force Quit would not let me quit the > frozen app or let me Re-launch the finder, so I used the button on the > back of the iMac to restart. > > The restart resulted in a folder icon on a gray screen with nasty looking > question mark in the middle. I have never seen this before but had a > pretty good idea the two plus year old iMac's hard drive was toast. The > good news was I able to boot from an external hard drive that contained a > SuperDuper backup and a separate partition for the Time Machine. The Disk > Utility confirmed there was something wrong with the Macintosh HD. > > I used the Apple Care web page to setup a technical support call for 8:00 > AM Christmas Eve and at the same time I scheduled an appointment with > the local Genius Bar for 9:15 AM. > > The 0800 tech support call confirmed the hard drive was most likely > toast and so did the 0915 visit to the Genius Bar. At 11:00 AM Christmas > Eve I picked up the iMac with a new hard drive and an Apple installed > generic OS X 10.6 installation. > > My plan was to go home and use my most recent SuperDuper backup > to restore everything; however, the Apple tech suggested that when I > booted the iMac to use the option in the Welcome screen to Restore from > the Time Machine. This was the start of the really bad news. > > The Time Machine restore worked but did not bring the iMac back to > where it was before the crash and many things would not run. I could > not print and the Get Info said it was only OS X 10.6, not the 10.6.2 > I was using before the crash. I clicked on the software update and it > downloaded and installed all kinds of stuff. When the updater said it > needed to restart, the iMac crashed big time and was still at 10.6.0 > after a restart. > > After wasting too much time with the Time Machine, I booted from the > external hard drive and had SuperDuper, erase then copy its contents > to the Macintosh HD. It worked perfect and I was back in business. > > Once I was sure things were working correct, I tried to run the Time > Machine and it could go back in time but could not back up. I don't > think the Time Machine could deal with the new media. At this point I > used the Disk Utility to erase the Time Machine partition and started over > with a clean back up. All seems well now. > > Needless to say SuperDuper saved me and I have little on no faith > in the Time Machine for a total restore to new hard drive installed by > Apple. > > My advice is do not rely totally on the Time Machine. Have another > back up plan and I recommend SuperDuper. It saved my six on > Christmas Eve. > > Happy New Year > > Ps: Santa delivered a new 13-inch MacBook Pro. -- YouTalk mailing list List address: [email protected] List information: http://entourage.mvps.org/support_options/list.html List moderator: [email protected], [email protected] To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe
