If disk Utility suggests you should ERASE your drive, that is a radical step - this will delete all your files with no possible way of recovering them. If Disk Utility made some repairs, but there are still some problems remaining, you should run it again until your drive comes clean, or Disk Utility reports it cannot be repaired. If that works, you have fixed the problems and you are done. Once Disk Utility reports your drive has been successfully repaired, you can try booting MacOS in the regular way.

Repair a disk using Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support Once you get Disk Utility running, this article describes how to repair your disk: This takes a little longer, so be patient. If you see a spinning globe, you have invoked (or fallen back to) Internet Recovery, and you see the Globe because it is fetching the Utilities from the Internet. 'Regular' Recovery gets the Utilities from special partition on your normal boot drive. Recovery Mode contains several useful functions, including a special version of Disk Utility that does not need the rest of MacOS to be running to do its job of repairing your disk. Since your Mac is not working normally, you can invoke Recovery Mode by holding Command-R at Startup. If nothing more happens, it is more likely the latter.ġ) First, use Disk Utility to Repair/First Aid your drive.

If you leave it alone for a few minutes and it discovers MacOS and boots up, the problem is the former. This can happen when that location get clobbered, or when the image at that location is not bootable. The blinking question mark appears when your Mac can't find a bootable MacOS at the location where it is usually specified.

Mac startup commands a1278