Screen of my mac showing flashing folder with question mark.

chscag

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Your Mac's Specs
2017 27" iMac, 10.5" iPad Pro, iPhone 8, iPhone 11, iPhone 12 Mini, Numerous iPods, Monterey
Which Mac? Year and model? What version of OS X is it running? The flashing question mark means it can't find the hard drive to boot from. (The drive may be damaged or dead.)
 
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at start up hold the option key and see if it will show the hdd.
It would help to know what model mac you have and what OSX your running...
The flashing folder with "?" in it means its not seeing a bootable disk...
Or the boot sector has been corrupted possibly during a failed update , a bad drive ... etc etc
It could be a simple matter of repairing the boot sector of that drive . If you had lion installed it will have a recovery partition
 
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Which Mac? Year and model? What version of OS X is it running? The flashing question mark means it can't find the hard drive to boot from. (The drive may be damaged or dead.)


Thank you for the feedback! Purchased the macbook in roughly 2005 or 2006. Not sure when I ran my last updates, maybe March 2012. It's been used for music since March 2012. Was running a couple of my personal xmas disks to play in I tunes when this happened. I do have original set up disks just hope I don't loose information and photos etc. I should have backed up!:(
 
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Silver M1 iMac 512/16/8/8 macOS 11.6
Trust you have everything backed up on an external drive. Boot from the system disc holding down 'C' after the chime, leave Installer and go to Utilities and run Disk Utility to find out the state of the hard drive. As ChrisMan said it is probably shot.
 

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