Hi everyone, so if you go to turn on your Apple Mac and you find yourself with a flashing folder with a question mark, this means that your startup disk is no longer available. Your computer can no longer get access to the operating system. So this is either the hard drive that is filed or the hard drive cable that connects it is broken. So you may have watched a bunch of other YouTube videos and found like myself that nothing else works. So in this particular video I'm going to show you what work for me. So let's run through the steps and see what we can do. Firstly, if you just have a blank computer screen make sure that your brightness is turned all the way up and that your Mac is turned on. Next before we get into the serious stuff we can try resetting the temporary non-volatile RAM. This is the temporary RAM that is for the speaker volume and for the startup data etc. So let's attempt at resetting the NV RAM and the P RAM. Firstly, turn off your Mac, then press and hold the option command P and R buttons at the same time and press the power button once. Then keep pressing the command P and R until you hear a second chime. If you don't hear a chime just let the startup bar run through twice. Now that's reset the NV RAM and the P RAM. Unfortunately for myself this hasn't worked so I'm back to the grey flashing folder. Okay, so there is a possibility that your Mac may be trying to boot from the wrong drive or partition. So to check this we can go into the startup manager. So firstly turn off your Mac by pressing and holding down the power button. Now when we go to restart Mac press and hold the option button and press the power button once. Continue to hold the option button until you see the options of different drives. As you can see on my computer I just have the one option. You can use the arrow keys or use your mouse to select the right drive. Maybe yourself it may say Mac and Tosh HD. Simply allow your computer to boot from that drive that you selected and hopefully it will work. For myself unfortunately it didn't so onto the next step. The next step is to try to repair the disk by getting into recovery mode and using disk utilities. So firstly turn off the Mac again by pressing and holding down the power button. And turn the Mac back on while pressing and holding the command plus the R key and press the power button once. Then release the keys when you hear the Apple chime or see the Apple logo on the startup screen. From here you may have to enter your administrator password or Wi-Fi password. So hopefully one of these steps has worked for you so far. If not like me I could not get into this particular screen so I decided to plug in my external hard drive which had my time machine backup on. Ok so with my external hard drive with time machine unplugged in I was able to press and hold the command and R and the power button once. And from here I was able to get into recovery mode after entering my Wi-Fi password. So once we are in disk utilities here you can see that I have got the time machine on the left hand side here and my other external hard drive but you can see that I have got no internal hard drive it just says disk images just here. So you can also check here it is not hidden so go to the drop down menu here and click on show all devices and see on the left hand side if your internal hard drive will show up. If you can see your internal hard disk select it on left here and then go up to the option first aid and click on that option now and repair that drive and then restart your Mac that may work for you. So unfortunately my hard disk isn't showing so I can not repair it so let's move on to the final option. Ok so now we are still in recovery mode and connected to the internet we are going to attempt at installing the Mac operating system on a new external hard drive. You can also use an old external hard drive but you would have to raise the disk completely so it would be prepared to lose everything that is on that disk. Ok so click on that external hard drive that we just plugged in and then go to the raise option and then name it something that you remember. So called this bootable drive and then on format make sure it is on Mac OS. Extended and GUID partition map. So once you click a raise that is going to raise absolutely everything on this disk so as I say make sure it is a brand new external hard drive or an external hard drive that you are prepared to lose all the data on. So now that is done we can quit this utilities and get back to the main recovery screen so you can just hit the X here or go to file and quit this utilities. Ok so now we are back in recovery mode. We can click on reinstall Mac OS and reinstall a new copy of the operating system. So we can reinstall this back onto that new bootable drive that we just plugged in. Fortunately I didn't record this section very well. It may take some time to reinstall the Mac operating system depending on how quick or internet speed is. After it is installed Apple will give you the option to migrate information from an old Mac or time machine so here I used my time machine that is plugged in. So I am finding that my computer is working just as fast as it was using this high speed external sand disk drive. I will leave a link to that below if you are interested that will click through to Amazon. Now the only problem I have got is that by having an external hard drive plugged in permanently it is using one of my USB C ports. I have only got two ports on this 2003 13i Mac so I am thinking the future. I may just take the back off this Mac and try to replace the physical drive. I did look into this to get it done a store I think it is going to be about 300 pounds so I will just give it a go myself I think at some point. Now there is one of your important points to make. You may want to go onto system preferences and go to start up disk here and then make sure the disk that you are now running the operating system on is selected. I rename my Macintosh HD during the formatting process. By doing this final step your computer will know which drive to use when you next shut down and start your computer up again. I hope you have enjoyed this video and please do like and subscribe. I hope this has fixed the problem for yourself. If you have any more questions please do leave a comment and yeah all the best with your computer.