Startup to question mark folder sometimes
I've been having this problem and hopefully someone knows what is going on. Here is the pattern of events:
When I restart my mac it starts up to the question mark folder sign, I then start it up on recovery and go to disk utility - it doesn't show my mac disk (just has something like baseOSx) so there is nothing I can do there and I just click the restart button and the mac then restarts normally and works just fine (maybe a little slower than usual but it's older so maybe that's normal).
This is the same course of events I have to go through every time I want to start my mac up again, in that I have to start up to recovery mode, do nothing, but somehow next restart works normally.
I've read around and couldn't find any solutions (when I run disk utility first aid I don't get any errors), so I thought the solution to prolong the life of it for now would be to just not let it shut down. However, it seems like overnight it crashed and shut itself down because I had to go through the whole cycle again this morning.
I updated to Catalina about 2 weeks ago, but this problem just started two days ago.
My battery needs to be replaced but I'm plugged into power the whole time.
I was going to bring it into service but the apple stores in my area are not up and running yet or next appointment is in two weeks.
Does anyone have any idea what could be the problem? I can't even begin to try to fix the problem because I have no idea what could be going on.
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.15