This site contains user submitted content, comments and opinions and is for informational purposes only. Apple may provide or recommend responses as a possible solution based on the information provided; every potential issue may involve several factors not detailed in the conversations captured in an electronic forum and Apple can therefore provide no guarantee as to the. Hard drive Icons - Download 961 Free Hard drive icons @ IconArchive. Search more than 600,000 icons for Web & Desktop here. How to Change the Hard Drive Icons on Your Mac Justin Pot @jhpot Updated September 10, 2017, 9:51pm EDT If you connect a lot of drives to your Mac—or connect a particular external hard drive to a lot of different Macs—it can all be a lot to keep track of.
Summary: When Mac shows folder with a question mark, you can follow this guide to fix this issue. Without losing important files, you can fix the question mark folder and boot up your Mac again.
Occasionally, you'll see certain error screens when starting up your Mac. That flashing folder with a question mark on Mac is one of those Mac boot errors.
It just appears, with no warning or pop-up in advance. You can't ignore and go past the question folder icon. Many users hope to fix this issue by a restart. However, it won't work in most cases.
Then how could you get rid of the question mark folder and boot up your Mac again?
Don't worry, you'll find a solution in this post.
The folder with a question mark icon means Mac can't find the hard drive or the system folder. It could be caused by software or hardware errors. You may see the blinking file folder at startup on your Mac in these situations.
The flashing folder shows just at a normal startup
It could happen if you have recently boot from an external system drive. What's more, you would see the icon if you install both Windows and Mac operating systems on your Mac machine. Jack casino free play. In these cases, you see the flashing folder with question mark simply because of wrong setups. That's to say, your Mac is confused when selecting the startup volume.
The folder with question mark icon shows after you replace a new HD or SSD
You could have replaced the Mac internal hard drive recently for better performance. If you're sure that you have a macOS on the new drive, then, the flashing folder might result from faulty connections. During the replacement, the SATA connection could get loose or damaged. So, your Mac has no startup disk to select if the Macintosh HD is not mounted.
The flashing folder shows after a recent macOS software update
Sometimes, this Mac has boot problems after or during the macOS update. The system files or the macOS directory could be corrupted. As a result, your Mac has trouble loading the operating system.
The Mac shows the question mark folder with clicking or beeping noise
In some cases, your Mac won't boot past the error screen due to hard drive corruption. Or what's worse, the Mac hard drive is severely damaged or even dead.
There could be some other situations. For example, the Mac boots into a black screen. But no matter how this issue happens, you are going to fix it for sure.
You could see the flashing folder on MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iMac, or Mac mini. But anyway, you can try these methods one by one.
If your Mac displays a flashing question mark at startup, you can wait for a moment and see if it can boot past the icon. If fortunately, it continues booting up, congratulations! But just in case, you can reselect a startup disk in System Preferences > Startup disk.
If you Mac can't boot past the flashing question mark, you can manually select the startup drive. You can do this by restarting your Mac while holding down the Option key.
Tips: In the case of some older Mac OS X machines, you can boot from the install DVD. It comes along with your Mac in the optical drive.
When the first methods won't work, you can boot into macOS Recovery Mode. It is part of the built-in recovery system of your Mac. macOS Recovery allows you to reselect the startup drive. To do this, you can follow these steps.
After you click on the Restart button, your Mac should then start up without the flashing question mark.
Tips: If you can't boot into macOS Recovery Mode, you can try it again over the Internet. You can replace the keys in Step 2 with Option + Command + R (or Shift+ Option + Command + R).
If there is no startup drive in the Startup Disk window, then you need to check the hard drive with First Aid. Probably, the startup drive is corrupted for some reason. If so, it's reasonable why the flashing folder with a question mark appears. Now, you can follow these steps to repair the startup disk with First Aid.
The worst situation is that you don't see your built-in startup disk in the Disk Utility. It indicates that there's a hardware issue. You need to check the connections of your hard drive. You can also contact the Apple authorized service for Mac repair.
Some other times, the startup drive is showing up in Disk Utility. However, Disk Utility finds issues with your startup disk that it can't repair. In this case, you need to move forward to the next part.
Apple photos on android. If Disk Utility can't repair the errors inside your startup drive, you need to reformat it. It's because the hard drive is seriously corrupted. And the quickest fix is to reformat this drive, which will assign a new file system.
However, reformatting will wipe your files off the hard drive. Slot machine apps for iphone. If you don't have a backup of your Mac, you would lose important files after reformatting.
So, to prevent data loss, here is your safe plan: Professional digital art software.
Up to now, your files would be retrieved to an external hard drive. Therefore, you are safe to reformat the startup drive as these steps.
All right, let's get down to fixing this issue without data loss.
Sometimes, Mac can't find the startup drive just because the connection is not firm.
So, if you boot from an external drive, you can check these factors.
If your Mac mini, MacBook Air, or MacBook Air shows folder with a question mark, you can check the SATA connection like this.
This works well if your Mac doesn't recognize the internal hard drive for booting up. But if it doesn't help, either the hard drive or the SATA connection is damaged. You'll ask for a repair or replacement service from Apple.
Conclusion
Most of the time, errors like the circle with line through it sign at startup and the folder with a question mark on the Mac screen means a system software issue. You can simply fix this by reinstalling macOS. But it could also result from the hard drive corruption.
In this case, you should get your important files off the Mac as soon as possible. Then you need to replace or repair the disk, in case it crashes your Mac again.
Read also:
0 
Star