Hi everyone,

I tried installing Leopard last night and long story short, it's not been successful.

I'd like to just revert back to Vista for now because I'm going into my last week of classes for the semester (ie. Finals) and shouldn't have even started this Poor planning... but watcha gonna do?

Right now when I boot with no disc in my drive I have the option to boot from Leopard, which did not succeed in install and always says I need to reboot, and Vista, which tells me that winloader.exe is not present.

So I put in my Vista disc to run recovery but my partition for Vista is not showing up in the recovery. Do I need to install some sort of HD driver at this menu so that the recovery disk will see the partition and be able to repair it?

Running the utility without selecting the drive does not allow it to repair.

Please help!

So I was planning to follow these instructions below hoping that they'd work for Vista:

To make your XP part active boot with your OSX 86 installation DVD.
In Terminal type
" Diskutil list "
then
" fdisk -e /dev/diskXsY " XsY is the designation of you XP part. X=0 usually.
" u "
" f Y " again Y is the partition # of the disc.
" w "
" y"
" q "
reboot
you should be in XP

But when I load up from the Leopard disk, it's not recognizing my keyboard now -.-

More help please!

EDIT:I got it to recognize the keyboard but when I run the fdisk -e /dev/disk0s1 is says that the Resource is Busy

If you are booting from the DVD, make sure your HD is not mounted in Disk Utility. Then fdisk willwork.

If you have a functional OS install, just boot into single user mode (-s) and run fdisk without mounting the drive.

Good Luck.

I got it to work by using these commands instead:

fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0
flag 1
quit
reboot

Then insert the Vista disc and repair.

Hope this can help someone else!

if i'm correct, your commands just told the machine to boot straight to your vista partition, the the Vista Repair disk fixed the boot problems. but did you get the recovery partition to work?


this whole scenario just happened to me (i did the same thing you did in the above post, but my recovery partition stayed missing)but i was able to fix it completely:

i have a thinkpad, which uses a recovery partition (press F11 at boot). after a screwed-up install, i somehow ended up with a winload.exe error and i was unable to get the recovery partition to start up.

then i read this: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Rescue_and_Recovery

cliff notes: if GRUB changes the MBR, the recovery partition won't work. thinkpad comes with a utility that you can use with a few switches in command line to rewrite the MBR entry. run it, restart, and the recovery partition starts listening for F11 again and it works.

worked for me!