Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2014 September 17

= September 17 =

MacOS question - What does a flashing folder with a question mark mean?
I bought a Mac a few weeks ago to do some iOS development. Today, in the middle of a TeamView session (from my Win8 PC to my MiniMac), the screen turned white and there's now a flashing folder icon in the middle of the screen with a question mark in the middle of the folder. What does this mean? A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 13:56, 17 September 2014 (UTC)


 * Here is the startup sequence and error codes/symbols. It sounds like you're describing the icon for "no bootable media," although it seems unlikely this would occur while the system was already booted.  Can you reboot in verbose mode?
 * Here are some more troubleshooting steps. Nimur (talk) 15:05, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Time Machine again
I have three backup drives, cleverly named TM1, TM2, TM3, which I rotate. A week or two ago I wiped TM1 because it appeared to be corrupt. Soon after that I jumped from Snow Leopard to Mavericks (or, as I like to call it, Mavérix le Gaulois).

Time Machine now does a funny thing: it persistently calls TM2 and TM3 by the same name, although Finder shows different names. Yesterday, having them both plugged in, I experimentally renamed TM3 to "Three", and Time Machine showed that name correctly. But on startup today, having only TM2 plugged in, Time Machine said something like "Warning: drive Three has changed its identity."

I guess this happens because, when I bought each drive, I loaded them with a copy of TM1 (as it was then) so as to have copies of the oldest backups on all three; it seems that Time Machine reads something in the disk's backup database to find its "name".

It's not a big hassle, I just have to click "go on and deal with it anyway" once a day, but still — can I make it go away, short of wiping TM3? —Tamfang (talk) 22:38, 17 September 2014 (UTC)
 * There must be some registration file in the hard drive that contained file id for TM1, and it, now being on TM2 and Three, is fooling OSX into changing its ID. Unless you have the time and patience to find the file, I can't see the problem resolving itself.  Konveyor   Belt   03:05, 18 September 2014 (UTC)