eMac is not able to recognize Hard Drive to boot Up

[Haimi-32]

I have been using eMac from a long time and I had a spinning wheel problem during the booting but then I was able to solve it by using single-user mode and then it was working fine and then actually I was asked for which HD to boot and I has chosen my hard drive but then now I am getting a flashing question mark during the booting and I get something like this: i type "Boot"... result = " hd:,\\:tbxi not found". Which I think is indicating that it is not able to recognize Hard Drive to boot up. Is there anyone who has an idea about the same and can help me out as well? Any suggestion for this will be appreciated.

[Aalap]

First of all why are you using your HD to boot I mean that you don’t have a cd or boot cd for mac?

If your answer is yes then can try out depressing the Option key during the startup and then check if it is making any difference actually doing this Startup Manager window gets activated and there you will be able to check your hard drive/partition to boot from. Just check it out and then let me know what you get. Best of luck.

[Haimi-32]

Yes i am not having a boot cd and that is why i am trying to boot from HDD and I have tried following the method that you have specified above and I don’t think that I have missed anything but then I have noticed that I am just getting a purple background with 2 icon which probably says " refresh & Next" .I am aware of the solution that you have said and I know that there should be icons in the middle as well but then I am just getting the just purple background .Is there any other solution that I can try out?

[Samaria]

Yes i am not having a boot cd and that is why i am trying to boot from HDD and I have tried following the method that you have specified above and I don’t think that I have missed anything but then I have noticed that I am just getting a purple background with 2 icon which probably says " refresh & Next" .I am aware of the solution that you have said and I know that there should be icons in the middle as well but then I am just getting the just purple background .Is there any other solution that I can try out?

If you are not having a Install disc then you can try to go in to boot in to Single User Mode and in order to go in to the Single User Mode you just have to press CMD+s keys at bootup and if you are able to enter in to the Single User Mode then try out /sbin/fsck –fy and after that just repeat the same till you get the no errors fixed and also make sure that you enter space between the fsck AND –fy and even if that does not work then you can try to perform disk maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck just check it out and then let me know what you get.

[Sasuke Uchiha]

I will like to inform you that flashing actually indicates that the Mac can't find a valid OS to start from and such cases are mostly because of a faulty HDD just take a look at here and see if you are getting any help

A flashing question mark appears when you start your Mac