In article <>, William Mulloy
<> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Starting today when I came home from work, I was greeted with something
> extremely strange.
>
> When I turned on my G4 (2001 DP 533), instead of the Mac OS 10.3.3 boot
> screen, I got a blinking square with a globe on it (NetBoot, if memory
> serves me right? I've never used NetBoot), which was replaced 15 seconds
> or so later by a folder with an alternating blinking Mac OS logo and
> question mark (Can't find OS, right?). I turned the system off and on a
> few times. I could hear the internal hard drive spinning up as usual.
> Nothing sounded out of the ordinary. But same thing happened. I then
> held down the option key while booting, to get to the Startup Manager
> (or is it called the Boot Manager?) where one can pick which partition
> (or external hard drive) to boot from.
>
> It was initially just a blank all purple screen. Then, suddenly, my
> internal hard drive (with its Mac OS X and Mac OS 9 partitions)
> appeared, followed shortly thereafter by my firewire drives. I picked my
> Mac OS X partition and booted it. Ran fine for hours. Then it got late,
> and I shut down for the night, but I decided to boot up again, and see
> if I had the same problem. Yep.
>
> Only this time, I decided to just sit there and do nothing. The same
> sequence of blinking globe to blinking system folder with question mark
> happened....and then Mac OS X booted as though nothing were wrong. I
> repeated this process 3 or 4 more times. Again...after showing that
> sequence, it will eventually boot.
>
> Questions for you:
>
> 1. What could be causing this? Is it a hardware problem? Is this a sign
> my internal Maxtor hard drive is going south? If that were the case,
> wouldn't one expect it not to boot at all? If you don't think my
> internal drive is failing, what could be causing this?
>
> 2. What should I do? Obviously, backing up data while I still can (I
> certainly hope those last 4 words aren't applicable) is a given....but
> what else should I do to restore normal booting? This just started out
> of the blue. I've thought of zapping PRAM, etc, but haven't actually
> done it yet.)
>
> Don't get me wrong. I'm pleased as punch that it will eventually boot.
> It's just that much more puzzling to me because it WILL boot after all
> that.)
>
> Help!
> -William Mulloy
It's possible that you are having some problems with your start-up drive.
It may be a software or hardware problem related to the start-up drive. If
it's a hardware problem, it could mean that the internal hard drive might
stop working in the near future. If you need data off the internal drive,
transfer it to another drive before it stops working. If it's a software
problem related to items stored on the internal drive, one solution would
be to intialize it and reload everything from your backup drive. I know
how to do it related to OS 8 and OS 9 but don't know how to do it related
to OS X and higher.
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