What causes a question mark icon to appear in a finder window?

Hello,
I was wondering if anyone knows what causes a question mark icon to appear at the top of a finder window?
Thanks!

Either the file or folder which was in that spot(if any) got moved or deleted, or a bad write to the Finder's plist file.
(67394)

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What else causes the question mark icon?

I just replaced the hard drive in my early 2008 iMac. On start up I'm still getting the question mark icon like I did when the original hard drive failed. I know that may have not gotten the connections in all the way. Also, the new drive could be bad. They didn't say it was refurbished or used, but it was pretty inexpensive.
I was told that my original hard drive was bad by a Certified Apple Reseller. Is there ANYTHING else it could be? Please help!

There are four possibilites:
1. PRAM problem. Try OPTION booting.
2. Directory corruption. Try using Disk Utility or other similar utility to repair the hard drive.
3. System files have been deleted or damaged. Reinstall OS X.
4. The internal drive has died or is otherwise non-functional.

Please help me with my mac. when i turned it on, a small question mark icon (?) appears at the center.

hi,
Please help me out with my MAC model m6497. when i turned it on, only a smallquestion mark appears at the center and does not proceed to its descktop at all

That folder with the question mark icon means that the MacBook can't find the boot directory. That can either mean it can't find the hard drive or the Operating System data on the hard drive is somehow corrupted.
Put your install DVD into the optical drive (CD/DVD drive) and reboot. Be sure to either use the disc that came with your Mac, or, if you installed a later Mac OS X version from disc, use the newer disc. As soon as you hear the boot chime, hold down the "c" key on your keyboard (or the Option Key until the Install Disk shows up) until the apple shows up. That will force your MacBook to boot from the install DVD in the optical drive.
Or if you are running 10.7 Lion, boot from the recovery partition (Command +R on boot) and use Disk Utility to repair your OS 10.7 partition.
When it does start up, you'll see a panel asking you to choose your language. Choose your language and press the Return key on your keyboard once. It will then present you with an Installation window. Completely ignore this window and click on Utilities in the top menu and scroll down to Disk Utility and click it. When it comes up is your Hard Drive in the list on the left?
If it is, then click on the Mac OS partition of your hard drive in the left hand list. Then select the First Aid Tab and run Repair Disk. The Repair Disk button won't be available until you've clicked on the Mac OS partition on your hard drive. If that repairs any problems run it again until the green OK appears and then run Repair Permissions. After repairing use Startup Disk from the same menu to choose your hard drive for restarting from your hard drive.
If your hard drive isn’t recognized in Disk Utility then your hard drive is probably dead.

What does a flashing question mark icon mean, alternating with the finder icon, at startup?

When I power up a small folder appears against a grey screen. Insode the folder are alternating question mark and finder icon.

It means that your iMac cannot find an operating system to boot from.
What version of OS X are you running?

Question marks across the top of new finder windows

Hello,
When I open a new finder window everything looks and works fine but I'm seeing 3 large question marks in the top gray area of the new finder window.
When I click it I get a message that says "The Item Can't Be Found".
What is this all about?
Thanks

you can put a link to any item in the toolbar. just drag it there from finder. you can get rid of such a link by command+dragging it off the toolbar. that's all there is to it.

Cannot scale Nivo slider on page, question mark icon appears in centre

Hi I have just paid the fee and downloaded new widgets and tools, and updated my Max to OS X 10.9. FIrst try out getting the Nivo slider onto my page is not working out. It refuses to scale how I want it (into a horizontal shape) and instead keeps bouncing to a large squarish shape, with a question mark icon appearing in the middle. Please can anyone help? Thanks....

Thanks Michael,
There's the rub, when I went to applications the fcp icon wasn't there. Yesterday I dumped a number of old fcp projects becuase I needed the space. Is it possible I dumped the program as well? If so, is there a solution? I am working on a number of recent fcp projects and would hate to lose them. I go to Finder but cannot find any fcp icons connected to the other projects. QTV is there, but no fcp.
Cheers
Bob

Question mark icon blinks at start up-help

My powerbook froze when I was surfing on Safari. The usual OptCmdEsc routine did not work. I held down the power button and it shut down. When I started up again-1st a grey screen blink ed on and then off. Then a question mark icon alternates blinking on and off with a folder icon appearing in its place every other second.
Can I hold down a "T" while starting up the computer to run off a firewire drive. I've heard of this-but what does it do? And what do I need to have on my hard drive to make it work. Also, can I start up off the mac x disc instead?
I have a 1.25 gig powerbook G4 running os 10.4.10.

Will it boot in Safe Mode? See
What is Safe Boot, Safe Mode? (Mac OS X)
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107392
Resolve startup issues and perform disk maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214
Look at A flashing question mark appears when you start your Mac
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58042
 Cheers, Tom

Dock Question Mark Icons

I've set up a brand-new Mac Pro tower as a master machine for the purpose of cloning it to other Intel-based Macs in various labs on campus. I've ironed out all the bugs on the master, and it's working exactly as we want it to.
I'm using Mike Bombich's NetRestore 3.3.6 to capture an image from the Mac Pro system. The capture and restore to various Intel iMacs works fine. However, the restored systems don't behave perfectly like on the master machine.
When a new user logs in via LDAP authentication on the iMacs, the dock shows up with lots of question mark icons. However, if that same user logs in the same way on the Mac Pro, everything shows up just as it should.
What would cause this behavior, assuming a perfect clone? Is there a simple solution?

I've confirmed that the _CFURLAliasData strings were the culprits in my case. I took ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist and opened it up with the Property List Editor (part of the Xcode tools). Anywhere I found _CFURLAliasData, I deleted that data entry, and saved it.
Since I'm in a lab environment, I needed it in the User Template, so a +sudo cp ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist /System/Library/User Template/English.lproj/Library/Preferences+ did the trick (and I made a new image off of that). After that, any LDAP/AD authenticated user that logged on was greeted to a nice dock full of icons, not question marks.
I posted about it here (http://benkreeger.com/blog/2007/09/mac-os-x-10410-breaks-dock-app.html), and that might give more insight (and a few screenshots, too).

Blue question mark icons

I made my site on iweb and everything looked fine. But after I publish, for some reason some of the links come up as blue question mark icons instead of the hyperlink. All of them are text links. One is a link to an external page, one is a llnk to one of my pages, and the other ones are links for emails.
What's confusing me is the fact that the link to the external age and the link to one of my pages is on the same page. However there's two other links exactly like them on the same page and those two are fine. I looked through the forums and read about the fact that some images might've not gone through. But the funny thing is that I looked through the files and html code and the links that are working don't have any images associated with them. The links that are NOT working however do have images made. Does anyone know what the problem is?

Post your URL and the users here can take a look at what you're seeing. Is this in Safari, Firefox, AND IE or just some of those?

Flashing Question Mark Icon on Start up. DEAD iMAC. HELP

Well, i think i've hit a break wall...
It wont even recognize my internal HDD, it just has a flashing question mark (?) icon when i start the machine.....i've used Tech Tool Pro 4 and the Leopard start up disk, both with no luck, they don't even think a HDD is present at all.
I have pics of what i'm looking at:
http://img695.imageshack.us/img695/9631/26052010014.jpg
http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/3278/26052010021.jpg
http://img684.imageshack.us/img684/6130/26052010019.jpg
http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/3041/26052010018.jpg
http://img535.imageshack.us/img535/4143/26052010016.jpg
its one dead HDD..... any clues on what to do next?
Message was edited by: Matt-Beasley

You must use the original grey system DVD disc that came with your iMac to run the Apple Hardware Test, the one that is marked with instructions for running the test on it. Depending on the version of OS X that shipped with your iMac, this could be either disc 1 or disc 2.
When you restart with this disc in the optical drive & the D key held down, you should not see a question mark icon or the leopard installer. If you do, it means that either you don't have the correct disc inserted, you waited too long to depress the D key, or you are releasing it too soon.
You don't say exactly which Core 2 Duo iMac model you have. If it is a Mid 2007 or later model, use the chart at Apple Hardware Test: iMac (Mid 2007) and later models to identify the AHT version you need. That version number should printed on the grey disc you need to use. You can't use the instructions there to start the test from the hidden HD partition if the HD is dead or damaged but the ones for running the test from the Install DVD should work fine.

Finder question mark icon

A few weeks ago I noticed a question mark icon embedded in the top of my finder window, on my laptop.
It is still there and is also now showing on my imac as well.
Could this be a virus, has anyone seen this b4?

glosshog,
An additional thought, for what it's worth...
You may have seen a pointer to an application or item which at one time was added, perhaps inadvertently, to your Finder toolbar. At some later point the item was deleted and thereafter the pointer had nothing to point to because the original could not be found.
The condition is easily reproducible. Choose an item on your hard drive -- a text file, image, small 3rd-party utility, AppleScript, e.g. -- and duplicate it. Open a Finder window and drag the duplicate item to the Finder toolbar (it might take a bit of coaxing for the item to find a position where it will stick; look for the green "+" sign). Once added, find the duplicate item you just created and send it to the Trash. And then empty the Trash. Open a new Finder window and you should see a question mark identical to the one seen in your screen shot. To remove the question mark -- or any toolbar item for that matter -- click and hold on the item with the command key pressed down, and drag the item from the toolbar until you see it go "poof."
Regards, Andrew99

HT203254 What is the question mark when I turn on the power?

When I turn on the power, it doesn't work but the question mark appears. What am I supposed to do? (question mark inside of a file mark)

The question mark means the system can't find anything to boot from. See this Apple note: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1440?viewlocale=en_US
You didn't specify your operating system, so if you have Lion, go into Lion recovery by booting and holding the command and R keys down to access Disk Utiity to repair the disk.

SPAU question mark icon

We're currently doing SPAU adjustments for our EHP4 package enhancement. I have some note corrections with a question mark icon. I tried "Calculate" and in "Background" but the status remained the same. I also tried running the program SAPRUPGM, with only my userid as parameter, but it returns that the program SAPRUPGM is locked under my userid. What should I do to process/adjust the notes in the SPAU list?

hello,
status question mark means unknown adjustment mode.Actually adjustment modes are calculated during the phase SPAUINFO.
Due to some reason adjustment mode has not been successfully calcuated for this object. You can again trigger the job to calculate the adjustment mode. Please check following help link for complete info :
http://help.sap.com/erp2005_ehp_04/helpdata/EN/2e/6d66587d9011d396b60000e82de14a/frameset.htm

How can I remove a Question Mark icon from Dock?

Long story short, I installed GeekTool from the AppStore.
The first thing I noticed was it put a unremovable icon on my dock.
So, I found and deleted the app (in Finder), and then I ended up with a Question Mark Icon on my Dock:
If I try and Drag/Drop it off my Dock, it floats back If I control click/right click on it, I get an 'Options' menu, with nothing under it.
After searching and searching and searching the Support Communities I found and tried the following: removed the com.apple.dockfixup.plist file, and did the 'killall Dock' command in terminal, both failed..
To make matters worse... I said to myself, perhaps if I reinstalled it again, and tried from scratch, I could find some 'uninstaller' either in the app, or in the AppStore. I found out the hard way, the AppStore does not have an Uninstaller. Now I have TWO icons I can not remove:
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Jay

Have you checked your Accounts login items for geektool? If so remove it.
Did you check your Activity Monitor to see if geektool.app is running (maybe two since you said you reinsalled two). If so kill it (or them).
Log out and log back in. Then see if you can drag the icons out of the dock.
Update: Actually if you do find them in your login items then you don't have to kill them, just log out and back in and try clearing the dock.
You also want to delete the preference pane in your ~/Library/PreferencePanes.

What does a question mark and i file mean on my macbook pro

what does a question mark and i file mean on my macbook pro when i turn it on?

To be more specific, the computer is not finding a valid system when it starts up. This may result from the hard drive's physical mechanism failing, or the system on the drive being corrupted in some way.
Repairing permissions is not likely to fix this issue. Instead I would suggest booting from the system install DVD, running Disk Utility, selecting your hard drive's partition and select *Repair Disk*.
Note: if the hard drive does not show up in Disk Utility at all, it is dead and will need to be replaced. Contact Apple (800-275-2273 in the USA) and have them set up warranty service, or carry the MacBook in to an Apple retail store to have it fixed. Be sure to [make an appointment|http://www.apple.com/retail] first you you may wait a long time to speak to a Mac Genius.
If Repair Disk finds any problems and is able to correct them, you may be able to restart and everything be okay. If it is unable to correct the problems, you will need to erase and restore your hard drive.
If Repair Disk does not find any problems, I would suggest an Archive and Install as described in [this article|http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1710].
Best of luck.

What causes a question mark icon to appear in a finder window?

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