File with question mark on mac screen

This can indicate a corrupt installation of Mac OS X or a failed or failing hard drive. Once the spinning gear appears the BSD kernel Darwin has assumed command and begins loading device drivers. Such are the workings of UNIX. What this means for us mortals is that when a Mac stalls at the Apple logo or the logo with a spinning gear, it probably has a corrupt Mac OS X installation. It may also be having trouble accessing an internal or external hardware component, but this is less-likely.

DiskWarrior is also worth a shot this is by far my most used disk utility. A hang at a blue screen, at the login window, or at the image of your blank desktop often indicates a Problem with a User Account. Corrupt Fonts or bad Preference Files. Setting up a second, emergency admin account on your Mac is helpful for troubleshooting account problems.

Safe Boot may help too, as that bypasses non-essential fonts and user startup items which you can then remove from your User Library folder. Presented in your native language, or something close. Mac crashes can take on all sorts of appearances — the Spinning Beach Ball being perhaps the most familiar — but Apple has succeeded in scaring the bejesus out of many users with this dialog. It is accompanied by the screen slowly darkening from top to bottom before a multilingual warning appears:.

A kernel panic can happen at virtually any point in the boot process and may indicate a corrupt OS, an incompatible kernel extension, or a hardware problem. Try a Safe Boot to disable non-Apple extensions. Intel Macs can also boot from a USB flash drive which contains a bootable disk image, this can be very handy in an emergency.

You can also use a clone of your Mac hard drive to boot a cantankerous system. This not only allows you to check, fix or copy data off the primary boot drive but continue working immediately when you have disk problems. Kacey — sounds like you have a bad hard drive. To follow up, just heard from the repair shop. The cable is bad. Logic board is fine. Thanks for your guidance. You also may have a hairline fracture on the logic board or loose connector on cable.

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No problems until Sunday morning. I was able to log in and clicked on Mail icon. It froze. I did a force quit. Same thing happened when I launched Safari. I was in for about a minute and then it froze. I let the logo and spin gear go for about 3 hours and nothing. I tried booting from the install DVD and no luck either. Took it to a third party repair store and he was able to mount my old drive externally and I was able to get in. He said either the cable from the HDD to the logic board was bad or the logic board was bad. Does this sound accurate?

If the logic board truly was bad, would I be able to do anything whether the drive was mounted interal or externally? It is a little over a year old and I do not have a valid warranty. This issue happened after I shut off the computer by holding the start button due to safari having a rainbow pinwheel for a few minutes. Why is this happening so randomly?

What is actually wrong and how much do you think it will cost to fix? Thanks so much Kacey. I suggest you take the laptop to an Apple Service Center. You can use the Get Info window in the Finder to give yourself access to your files from another admin account, or boot the iMac in Target Disk Mode and access from a second system. When I try to log in it goes to the page with Finder in the menu bar and then 2 or 3 seconds later goes straight back to the login page whether or not I click with the mouse or try using the keyboard.

We tried changing the password but it makes no difference. My daughter is the administrator so we can log in as her and use the computer but I am unable to access the documents I have under my log in. Please can you advise how to correct this so I can log on or is there a way to access my documents through her account? I am not that computer literate but have tried searching through the Apple help menus to no avail. Kind Regards Karen. Mac repair guy said… oh you saw the kernel panic before the problem? I wasnt aware of what it was called. Now I find out tomorrow how serious the issue I have to pay for is.

I still get a grey screen — no logo. One day, it decided not to even give me the POST chime. I said no thanks and went home. This time was no exception. I unplugged everything from the logic board except for the power supply and video connections and hit the power button.

Sure enough, I got a chime. Began plugging things back in one at a time until I found the culprit. Turned out to be the hard drive temp sensor.

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No expensive logic board replacement, just a little temp sensor board. I sometimes think back and wonder what excuse they would have come up with after a new logic board did nothing to fix the problem. After a week or two new battery is dead. Rather costly to replace battery times a year. Otherwise this old wind tunnel is working perfectly.

My OSX shows firmware password screen which i have no idea why it started coming up but i can bypass it sometimes by holding cmd-apple-o-f keys but the keyboard doesnt work.. I tried holding down the alt option to choose a different drive to startup from but nothing happens, so I put in a Snow Leopard disk and now it starts up to a screen telling me to change the batteries in my mouse. Have any ideas? My email is namizich gmail. What is going on? I have a Macbook Pro, It has had a new hard drive now, as the old one died, I also apparently have a new motherboard because there is a generic problem with my competer models boards so this was replaced free of charge.

My problem now is that when I turn on my compter it takes ages of just freezes showing a world flashing. You will need to reformat and re-install from the recovery screen. You only need to replace the hard drive cable if you can't erase your disk. If you don't have an external drive there is no way to backup from recovery unfortunately.

I wouldn't recommend re-installing without erasing the disk. Click here to read my Genetics blog if you like. Just a question: Will Installing OS X on my flash drive while the hard drive is connected do anything to the hard drive? Thanks again. You need to be a member in order to leave a comment. Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy! Already have an account? Sign in here. By xth3weatherman Started 3 minutes ago Posted in Displays. By kofman13 Started 21 minutes ago Posted in Phones and Tablets.

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