Start the computer and only show a folder with question mark

Hi,
I need help please.
A few day ago I startup up my iMac and only a folder with a question mark was shown in the screen.
I boot from the Lion DVD, run disk utility but the only drive I get was the DVD and disk1/Mac OS X Base System.
I turned off the computer and next morning I turned on agian and this time with no problems, I use it for a few days with no problems but yesterday it happens again...
I do run disk utility again onlu turn it off, and this morning I tried to turn it on again, but the same foder appears...I run disk utility (get the DVD and disk1) and turn it off for a few hours.
Now I'm praying that when I'm back from work I could turn it on with no problems.
What I should do ? Is there any 3rd party tools that I can try do use to solve this issue ?
Many thanks!
PS: when the iMac started up with no problems I run disk utility and made a repair disk to the mac HD...

leonel junior wrote:
I boot from the Lion DVD,
There are no Apple supplied Lion boot DVD's , you use command r to boot into Recovery HD partition, if that doesn't work good chance the drive is dead, it likely will have to pulled to test any data recovery efforts made.
I turned off the computer and next morning I turned on agian and this time with no problems, I use it for a few days with no problems but yesterday it happens again...
Hold Shift key upon boot to fix the drive, reboot holding option and select OS X to boot and head to System Prefs, change the startup drive to OS X.
If you can't do this, your looking at data recovery efforts or repalcing the drive, total erase & restore.
PS: when the iMac started up with no problems I run disk utility and made a repair disk to the mac HD...
The option key, set startup disk in system prefs should resove the issue.
https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro?view=documents

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Start the computer and only show a folder with question mark

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