trouble shooting a non booting OSX mac

[westredd]

hi mac people,

i was just wondering what are the initial troubleshooting steps that one should take when encountering an OSX MAC that has the dreaded question mark icon on boot up. I was familer with this on OS 8-9, usually booting to nortons utility CD and scanning the hd for errors. Not so sure about OSX though. Any experienced technicians that deal with this situatuion regularly can advise?

cheers for your time,.

West

 

[jmgalvin]

About the same as before with some minor changes. Boot from the osx cd/dvd, open and run Disk Utility (similar to mac's earlier disk first aid) on the cd and see it that fixes things.

You'll also find a hardware test on the cd/dvd, which can also be run

Using OSX 10.3.9 on a G4