Question Mark on Screen at Power On?

[mark-itguy]

I'm pretty sure it means the system can not find the boot drive, but...

My iMac stays on 100% of the time, but a few months ago I turned it off for about 18 hours during a storm. When I turned it back on, I got the flashing question mark. I turned it off & back on about 8-10 times, when it finally booted up just fine.

It never does it at a reboot, only if off a while. For several months, it did this any time it was off a while.

About 6 weeks ago, it stopped doing it! Now, I can't MAKE it happen!

I should feel lucky, but I'm also nervous about an impending failure. When SL came out, I repartitioned the drive, first going to MBR, then back to GUID, just to re-write everything. That neither helped (the issue was already gone), nor hurt.

It still won't ever do it. Fluke, or should I be planning for a drive failure?

 

[nando2323]

Could be a drive failure or a corrupted boot sector, this happened to mine and it was a corrupted boot sector, I had to reinstall the OS in order to fix it. It sounds to me that that's all it was for you too. I would say you are OK as long as you don't start hearing some strange noises coming from your hard drive.

 

[shoulin333]

<---- fail, please delete.

I replied before reading the whole first post

 

[BryanLyle]

Make sure you keep recent backups just in case. The last thing you need is to lose everything.