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Question mark on Macbook Pro Screen

A terrifying thing can happen on occasion when you go to turn on your Macbook Pro. You are greeted with a flashing question mark. What does this blinking question mark mean?

The question mark appears on Macbook Pro notebooks when the unit can not find the files it needs to load OSX (or your OS / Operating System).

Problems can be:

  • Bad Hard Drive
  • Missing Startup Files
  • System Preferences need updating

Sometimes if the flashing question mark disappears after a few seconds you can simply update your system preferences. To do this, select System Preferences from the Apple menu, then select the correct hard disk you would like you MBP to boot from. If this does not help you most likely have a bad hard drive. During our free diagnostic here we can test the hard drive and tell you if the drive has damage or not. Drives spin at 7,400RPM and fail all the time. It is the most fragile piece of your computer and they all break – it is not if but when.

We have heard mixed reviews about the Genius Bar and data recovery options. If you have important data on the unit be sure to bring the hard disk in for a free evaluation and we will see if the data can be retrieved. We are very familiar with recovering data from the OSX operating system. If a hard drive is failing, tools like Migration Assistant are not going to allow you to read the drive.

It is also important to note that we replace Macbook Pro hard drives here. Hard drives are in stock and we can reload your OS as well.

Related pages you may want to visit on our site include:

macbook pro