Flashing folder - came and went - forewarning of disaster to come?

Today, upon re-booting up my iMac Leopard, the flashing folder icon appeared. I shut down and restarted, and things are back to normal.
Should I be concerned? Is that the forewarning of something bad is cooking and could errupt in the near future?
What should I do? Reinstall Leopard? (What a pain). My Time Machine is working well, though.

My friend had this happen to his MacBook Pro just after he installed Leopard. He had to hold down Option on startup in order for the computer to be able to detect his drive as a bootable one. He hasn't had any problems since, though. I would run "Repair Disk" in Disk Utility on the Leopard disc, and if there aren't any problems, you should be okay.

Similar Messages

  • So i have a 2011 MacBook Pro and when i turned it on this morning a flashing folder came on with a question mark in the middle of it and it keeps flashing. So i tried googling any solutions and up so far nothing has worked. Please Help ?

    I tried googling several solutions, but so far nothing seems to work. Everytime i start up my laptop i press CMND+R to make it go to the repair disk utility but instead it takes me as if i have to install lion when i had Snow Leopard 10.6.8. When i do go to the repair disk utility, on the eft hand side shows two hardrives one is Untitled and another is Hitachi, i tried downloading snow leopard 10.6.8 onto a Re-writable disc  using my windows computer. When i insterted it onto the disc drive it came out under SUPER DRIVE and everytime i double click on the CD it says something about attaching images/ I also forgot to mention that the MAC OSX 10.6.8 Update shows on the left hand side on the bottom in DMG format. I dont know what else to do, please help?

    DestroyGalaxies wrote:
    a flashing folder came on with a question mark in the middle of it
    This is the firmware telling you it can't find a bootable OS X volume.
    Usually to solve this all you do is hold the option key down on the built in keyboard while booting the computer, this enters Startup Manager and then you choose OS X to boot, then in System Preferences > Startup Disk you change it to the boot volume and it tells the firmware.
    Everytime i start up my laptop i press CMND+R to make it go to the repair disk utility but instead it takes me as if i have to install lion when i had Snow Leopard 10.6.8.
    What you have is a 10.7 or 10.8 Recovery HD from when 10.7 or 10. was on the machine previously.
    The Macintosh HD partition only was erased and 10.6 installed on it, without erasing the entire drive like what should have occured to remove the Recovery HD partition.
    So you have a mucked up machine.
    i tried downloading snow leopard 10.6.8 onto a Re-writable disc  using my windows computer.
    Well there goes your problem there, your downloading illegal copies of Snow Leopard from a untrusted location.
    10.6 is not available for download, except from pirate sites. You likely have malware or a compromised system.
    I dont know what else to do, please help?
    What you need to do is call Apple via phone, tell them the make of your machine and order the appropriate 10.6 disks, they are inexpensive now. Some machines that came with 10.6.3+ origianlly need machine specific disks, other wise pre-10.6.3 Intel Macs can use the 10.6.3 white retail disks.
    Once you have the disks, you need to backup your personal information off the computer to a external storage drive using the emergency quick copy method, then disconnect it to prevent mistakes.
    Most commonly used backup methods
    Next follow this proceedure and make sure to select the ENTIRE drive on the far left with the drive makers name and size, this will erase the entire drive, then install 10.6 from the disk
    How to erase and install Snow Leopard 10.6
    When finished setup the machine and log onto the Internet and use Software Update to get current on 10.6.8
    Don't use pirated software, it's likely been compromised in some fashion.

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    Hello!
    The trouble began in Google Hangouts on Air. When I'm in conference room I read that my mic doesn't work. I checked settings, chose "default" one time and my microphone name another time. Both variants don't help. On the right end of an address bar I read this message: "this page has been blocked from accessing your camera and microphone". I clicked it, chose "Allow", after reloading the problem returns. Then I went to Chrome exceptions and allowed my mic on the site.
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    These are related but not identical issues. Their causes are outlined in Intel-based Mac- Startup sequence and error codes, symbols. Solutions may be found in:
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    Download and install Mac OS X 10.6.8 Update Combo v1.1.
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    Try booting in Safe Mode
    http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1455
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    I tried booting in Safe Mode by holding down shift while starting, but it just went to the flashing folder with the ?-mark in it. Then I tried to enter single-user mode by holding down cmd-S while starting (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1492), in order to try the fsck-thingy, but still just the flashing ?.
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    I also tried using the computer as a FireWire target in order to retrieve some data (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1661). When I bootet the "broken" computer and held down T the FireWire symbol appeared on the screen. But on the host computer I could not find the target computer.
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