Mac Software

Mac os9 flashing question mark and face - how can i get past it?!?

January 18th, 2010 | by admin |

I’ve been having to swap between mac osx 10 and 0s9 and a powerbook g4 for a quark to indesign conversion project. I have been doing this via the system preferences - start up disc method.

All was going well.

When i came in this morning to switch the mac on, it’s obviously trying to start in os9, which is the last system we left it on, on shut down last night.

However, it’s not starting up, it’s just flashing a question mark and smiley face icon. I understand this is because it can’t find the os, and we just need to "remind" it of where it is - but we can’t find the disc, and i don’t know if there is a way of getting it to boot up in either osx10 or os9 without it?
Restarting the machine and then as soon as it chimes, holding down the "X" key on my keyboard to boot into osx does not work. It is trying to boot in os9, there is no chime.

There is spinning noise etc coming from the hardware, I’m pretty sure this is not a hardware issue.

You should be able to start your machine up into OS X without too much trouble.
-> Restart the machine and as soon as it chimes, hold down the "X" key on your keyboard. It should boot into OS X.

If you want to try to get it to start into OS 9, you need to find any Bootable System Disc (I think 8.5 and above would work fine). Once you boot from the CD, you should be able to use the Startup Disk Control Panel to select the System Folder on your internal HD and reboot from it. This is called "blessing" the system folder. When you switch between OS X and OS 9, the Startup Disk Control Panel is simply blessing one System folder and then another.

If you don’t hear your drive spinning up at boot time, or it is making strange noises (whirr - clunk, whirr - clunk) then you may be looking at a hardware failure.