underwoodmatt Posted May 3, 2008 Share Posted May 3, 2008 Hi, I think I have a serious problem and any help will be much appreciated. When I turn on my macbook I get the flashing question mark. If I run the leapord installation cd by holding 'c' I can only get as far as choosing a destination to install - there is no available destinations to choose. In disk utility the hard drive is listed on the left hand side, along with 'disk0' beneath it, but all the options on the right hand side are greyed out apart those in the 'RAID' tab. The s.m.a.r.t status is 'verified' and the partition map scheme 'unformatted'. This has occured after attempting to install XP (without service pack 2) in Boot Camp. I'm fairly sure that I chose the wrong drive to partition - there was only one to choose from so I went for it. From what I've gathered since, this was probably very stupid, it should've been called bootcamp and I'm pretty sure that it wasn't. In disk utility, when I select 'disk0', at the bottom of the window along with all the other info it has 'Format: Windows NT File System (NTFS).' I have a Tech Tools CD but cannot run it with 'c' or any other keys I have found recommonded. So basically I'm stuck, is there anyway to reformat drives back to their orignal status through Terminal commands or anything like that? Losing data is not a problem, I've only had the macbook for a few weeks and I have backed up on cd's anything that is important. I'm not especially knowledgable about these systems and the terminology but any advice at all would be helpful; I really need to get this mac working again asap. Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sg Posted May 3, 2008 Share Posted May 3, 2008 if you just want to format your drive and reinstall without trying to save anything (i'm not sure if you can save anything really), you can boot from your OSX dvd, go to the top menu to 'Utilities' and go to 'Disk Utility'. you'll then want to click on your physical drive on left side (not the partition) under it, then on the right side click on the partition tab at the top, go to 'options' and choose 'GUID Partition Table' then just choose how many partitions you want and hit 'apply'. this should properly format your drive with the proper partition map. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
underwoodmatt Posted May 4, 2008 Author Share Posted May 4, 2008 yeah thanks - the problem was that literally everything in disk utility was greyed out so i couldnt erase or partition or anything. eventually though i noticed i could 'unmount' disk0 and after doing so everything was available again so ive got it back to the proper partition map now and reinstalled os x. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shishnit Posted September 6, 2008 Share Posted September 6, 2008 Underwoodmatt, I'm in the EXACT same scenario you're in, however when I tried to unmount the partition, all of the options are still greyed out. Was there anything else you did besides unmount? *edit* I got it working too again, just had to exit disk utility after I unmounted, and went as far back as I could in the OS X installation then came back and options were available. One thing I dislike about mac, is everything is a guessing game on how to get things working, like unmounting the partition. Who knew that would get things ungreyed out? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Morgan Posted September 8, 2008 Share Posted September 8, 2008 Sometimes, you've got to reboot back into the Installer after formatting for it to show up properly... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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