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By Christopher Breen
Note:This article is an excerpt from "MAC 911" © 2002 Christopher Breen Reproduced by permission of Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Peachpit Press. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. To buy this book, visit www.peachpit.com
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This blinking icon is the Mac's way of telling you that it can't find the System software it needs to start up.
Treatment 1: Make sure the drive is bootable.
Not all hard drives are bootable on all Macs. You can't boot a Blue & White Power Mac G3 or a Power Mac G4 (PCI Graphics) from a FireWire drive, for example. Neither can you boot from all USB drives. If you've been able to boot from the drive in the past, you've got a problem. If the drive is new, and you have no other bootable drive attached to your Mac, check the documentation to be sure you can use it to start up your Mac.
Treatment 2: Unplug your peripherals.
Add-on hardware can cause this problem sometimes. Remove any external devices save your monitor, keyboard, and mouse (and your external hard drive, if you use it to boot your Mac). If you do boot your Mac from an external hard drive, ensure that its cables are seated properly. And if that external drive is a SCSI device, be sure that its SCSI ID isn't set to a number that's likely to conflict with any other SCSI devices attached to your Mac. SCSI ID 0 normally is reserved for the Mac's internal drive, SCSI ID 3 for the CD-ROM drive, and SCSI ID 7 for the Mac itself.
Treatment 3: Boot from your system/repair disk.
If your Mac won't boot from the System Folder that you swear is on your startup drive, force it to boot from another disk. If you have a Mac old enough to have shipped without a CD-ROM drive, rummage through your possessions until you find a floppy disk capable of booting your Mac. You can start up floppy-friendly Macs with the Disk Tools floppy disk that shipped with early Macs. More-recent Macs ship with a CD-ROM that can be used as a startup disk. To boot from a CD-ROM, hold down the C key on the Mac's keyboard after pressing the Mac's Power button. If the C-key trick doesn't work, try pressing Command-Shift-Option-Delete. This key combination tells the Mac to try to boot from a device other than the startup disk.
When you've booted from that System disk successfully, run Apple's Disk First Aid to diagnose and (possibly) repair the drive. If you have a more-robust diagnostic/repair utility—such as Alsoft's Disk Warrior, Micromat's TechTool Pro, or Symantec's Norton Utilities—boot from your repair disk and then diagnose the drive.
Treatment 4: Check for a valid System Folder.
After booting from your System/repair disk, open your hard-disk icon, and scroll down until you find the drive's System Folder, which should sport the icon of a smiling Mac. If not, this System Folder is not blessed (meaning that the Mac doesn't recognize it as the real deal and, therefore, won't use it to boot your computer). To bless the folder, open it, drag the System file to the desktop, close the System Folder, drag the System file back to the System Folder, open and close the System Folder, and pray that the "blessed" icon appears. If it does, try rebooting your Mac.
Treatment 5: Toss stuff.
Corrupted preferences files sometimes cause a System Folder to go unrecognized. Open the Preferences folder inside the System Folder, locate the Finder Preferences file, and drag it to the Trash. Then reboot the Mac.
Treatment 6: Zap your PRAM.
Parameter RAM (lovingly referred to as PRAM—pronounced "pea-ram") holds certain software settings (including date and time, AppleTalk's on/off state, and startup-disk information) in a bit of carefully maintained RAM on the Mac's motherboard. PRAM can get munged up occasionally, and when it does, trouble results—including a Mac that won't boot properly. To flush—or zap—this parameter RAM, hold down the Command-Option-P-R keys at startup. When the Mac starts a second time, let go of these keys.
Treatment 7: Perform a clean install.
If the drive appears to work but its System Folder refuses to boot your Mac, perform a clean install of your System software. To learn how to do so, see Chapter 2.
This retrograde-inversion of the classic "all the lights are on, but nobody's home" conundrum is rarely a serious problem.
Treatment 1: Check the monitor's power switch.
Is the monitor plugged in? Is it switched on?
Treatment 2: Check the brightness control.
PowerBook and iBook users often turn down the screen brightness to save battery power. If your Mac or monitor has a brightness control, turn it up.
Treatment 3: Check your monitor cable.
Perhaps the heft of the darned things is the problem, but monitor cables have an annoying way of coming loose. Make sure that yours is plugged in properly. Monitor cables that are partly plugged in can cause your monitor to display odd colors—lots of green or pink, for example.
Treatment 4: Check your video card.
Though they're not as prone to becoming unseated as the monitor cable is, graphics cards can come loose—particularly if they're not bolted to the case securely with the screw provided for that particular purpose.
Treatment 5: Swap in a new monitor.
Now that computers are as common as coffeemakers, borrowing another monitor shouldn't be difficult. If the borrowed monitor displays the Mac's video signal properly, you may need a new monitor. Note: Monitor repairs can be expensive. Before committing to a costly repair, price new monitors. It may be cheaper simply to buy a new one.
Such startup problems usually can be traced to an extension or hardware conflict. Extensions—the bits of computer code that add functionality to the Mac's operating system—occasionally conflict with one another. When they do, all kinds of h-e-double-toothpicks can ensue—including a Mac that freezes during the startup process. SCSI and USB conflicts can have the same effect.
Treatment 1: Hold down the Shift key at startup.
Holding down the Shift key at startup disables extensions, most control panels, and all items in the Startup Items folder. If your Mac boots properly with the Shift key down, you have an extension conflict. To learn how to deal with extension conflicts, see Chapter 3.
Treatment 2: Unplug your peripherals.
The hardware devices attached to your Mac—printers, removable media drives, scanners, MP3 players, whatever—can also come into conflict and keep your Mac from booting as it should. Try stripping your Mac of everything but the keyboard, mouse, and monitor.
Treatment 3: Zap your PRAM.
Rather than give you the impression that I'm padding my page count by parroting the same information over and over, I'll simply suggest that you flip back a couple pages to learn how to do this.
Treatment 4: Boot from your system/repair disk.
The reason for taking this action is similar to the reason stated earlier in this chapter: your Mac's hard drive may be so confused that even with extensions disabled, peripherals peeled away, and PRAM zapped, it can't summon the gumption to boot your computer.
Few things are more distressing than finally booting your Mac from an emergency disk only to discover that your hard drive is missing in action.
Treatment 1: Run Disk First Aid or another disk-repair utility.
You'll find a copy of Apple's diagnostic/repair utility on the System disk that shipped with your Mac. Launch this utility, and pray that it recognizes your hard drive. If so, attempt to repair it. If Disk First Aid fails to find the drive, and you have a more robust diagnostic/repair utility—such as Disk Warrior, TechTool Pro, Norton Utilities, or the Apple Hardware Test CD (a CD that ships with some late-model Macs)—boot your Mac from that utility disk, and run the utility in the hope that it will recognize and repair your drive.
Treatment 2: Run Drive Setup.
If your diagnostic/repair utility fails to find your drive, launch Drive Setup (also on your System disk) and see whether it can see the drive. If the drive appears in the list of available drives, attempt to mount it by selecting the drive and choosing Mount Volumes from Drive Setup's Functions menu.
Treatment 3: Unplug your peripherals.
Unplug any external peripheral cables, excluding those attached to your keyboard and monitor. If you have two or more internal hard drives, disconnect cables to all but the startup drive. If the Mac boots from the drive, you have a hardware conflict that I'll deal with in "Peripheral Problems" in Chapter 2.
Treatment 4: Check your cables.
Be sure that any data and power cables running to your start up drive are seated securely.
Treatment 5 (next-to-last-ditch effort): Give your hard drive a tiny tap.
Troubleshooting experts blanch when you offer this recommendation, but it works occasionally. If all else fails, try giving your hard drive a tiny jolt with the heel of your palm—and please, do this with the Mac and hard drive switched off! Hard drives can get gunked up to the point where their platters won't spin or their drive arms refuse to flit across the drive platters to read and write data. A gently jolt sometimes convinces them to work again. Note: This operation is a next-to-last resort, for a very good reason. Banging a hard drive can seriously mess with its well-being. Perform this operation only if you see no other way out (and are resigned to losing everything on your disk anyway). And as frustrating as a dead drive may be, don't do this when you're angry.
If this treatment works and you're able to boot from the drive, immediately back up everything on the drive—you're living on borrowed time—and replace it. A drive this badly gunked is not one that you ever want to rely on again.
Treatment 6 (last-ditch effort): Call DriveSavers.
DriveSavers (www.drivesavers.com; 800 440-1904) is a wonderful company that will charge you a small fortune ($700 and up) to recover data from a drive that appears to be hopelessly trashed. If you've neglected to back up your data, and that data is worth more to you than one (1) arm and one (1) leg, give these good people a call.
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