Wierd Icons appear on startup

M

Masamune

Registered
After i hit the button on the bac of my mac mini and it gives me the start up noise it has always taken me straight to the apple logo on the grey background.
This is no longer the case.
Now when i hit the button and get the start up noise it gives a me a flashing icon of a planet (presumably earth unless it's communication from some unkown alien source ::alien:: ) on a grey background, this goes on for a minute or two then i get another flashing icon replacing the first, this one is the finder icon on one flash and then a question mark on another.
Once these two icons have had their time the computer goes onto the apple sign and boots up normaly with no further problems.
I have been having this problem for 2 or 3 days now and it's extremely annoying.

Any help will be much appreiciated.

Thanks

Masa
 
Use the Startup Disk PreferencePane and choose your boot drive and see if that helps.
 
Tried it again last night but this time i locked any changes and it seems to have worked but when i was shutting down i got a black screen and the white writting, i only saw a bit of it but it said somthing about somthign being locked so is my mac automatically trying to find somthing and finding it locked against doing so?
 
Masamune said:
After i hit the button on the bac of my mac mini and it gives me the start up noise it has always taken me straight to the apple logo on the grey background.
This is no longer the case.
Now when i hit the button and get the start up noise it gives a me a flashing icon of a planet (presumably earth unless it's communication from some unkown alien source ::alien:: ) on a grey background, this goes on for a minute or two then i get another flashing icon replacing the first, this one is the finder icon on one flash and then a question mark on another.
Once these two icons have had their time the computer goes onto the apple sign and boots up normaly with no further problems.
I have been having this problem for 2 or 3 days now and it's extremely annoying.

Any help will be much appreiciated.


Thanks

Masa
Click to expand...
Hi i'm getting the same symptoms, did you ever resolve this?
if not does anyone have an idea? Thanks
 
Well, the planet probably tells you that the Mac is trying to boot from a (unavailable...) network volume instead of the internal harddrive. Setting things back up in Startup Volume _should_ definitely do the trick.
 
fryke said:
Well, the planet probably tells you that the Mac is trying to boot from a (unavailable...) network volume instead of the internal harddrive. Setting things back up in Startup Volume _should_ definitely do the trick.
Click to expand...
So how do i set this back up? sorry forgot to mention that i have an Ibook
10.3.9 w/ 1.25 gig memory. thanks, a Mac newb
 
Hold down the option key while starting the computer. It should give you at least one option, i.e. to choose your main drive with OS X to boot from. After you're logged in, go to System Preferences -> Startup Volume and set it to the right volume.
 
Hey i got it, thanks. but to edit your post for future ref, my mac
shows it as "startup disk" instead of startup volume. don't know
how this got changed but its fixed now. thanks again, i'm learning
this mac thing!
 
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