flufftronix

Update: I continued to mess around with the MBR, trying to bless the partition etc. until I accidentally erased the MBR. I ended up restoring all my data onto another drive, reformatting using one of the tools on Ultimate Boot CD, and reinstalling OSX. Everything works very, very well now, updated to 10.4.8 without a hitch, and the 'puter seems to be running ridiculously fast. I think my problem was originally formatting my drive using PartitonMagic. Moral: Weird problems? Starting the install over, KNOWING you're doing everything right will take less time, even if there's a lot of data to transfer back and forth.

Looks like Data Rescue II 1.1 for OSX sees all the missing stuff.. now I just gotta find 77gb of free space to restore this to.

I'm familiar with Hiren's Boot CD.. don't have it, but I'm sure I can get it easily enough. I'm more looking for what app can actually address this.. I've got a MacBook as well and have been running through the various osx data recovery options (tech tool pro, diskwarrior, drive genius) with no success so far :\

So; yeah.. I've been messing around trying to get my hackintosh to boot without the dvd and seem to have deleted the mbr. As in, when I read it with fdisk nothing is listed. It's a 320gb drive which had one 298gb HFS+ partition on it. Is there any way I can get this back? It's kind of important. Thanks in advance.

Despite ongoing just-boots-from-DVD issues, this update work for me too. Thanks JaS!

I should add that if I rebuild the MBR using Recovery Console, I can get a "Operating system not found" message, if that's helpful at all..

So, I managed to install OSX86 onto an 80gb IDE drive and everything worked fine. I decided to switch over to a larger hard drive, and formatted a 320gb drive FAT32 with a PartitionMagic boot disk. I then ran Disk Utility and formatted the FAT32 partition HFS+ and restored the 80gb partition onto it. I then booted into the Install DVD and through terminal followed the instructions posted in the Genius Bar for setting a partition active with fdisk etc. And now, I can boot into OSX just fine as long as the install DVD is in the drive, but without it I don't even get a "...Operating System not found" message, it just says "j" with a blinking cursor next to it. What does this mean, and how do I fix the thing? I'm using a JaS 10.4.7 DVD, and have access to the Windows Recovery Console and PartitionMagic boot disks. Oh, and this is the only partition on the drive, no other OS'es to muddle things up.

Makes sense, thanks Rammjet. Suppose I'll do the OSX install for a third time now :\ At least the errors of the last couple hours make sense now! ;p

So just formatting the whole drive as HFS+ doesn't work? Hmm.. this would explain a lot.