CompCrasher86 Posted October 6, 2008 Share Posted October 6, 2008 Honestly, I could write a story on my tribulations, but right now I need my Vista back. After installing OSX, my vista partition is no longer bootable. If it is set to "active", it will just get stuck in a bios reboot loop. It has a recovery partition which was put on the hard drive (instead of Dell giving me a DVD of the OS) with a clone of the system in it's factory state (10gb big). Somehow, my drive letters were mixed around during the repartitioning so now some tiny dell diagnostic partition has "C" and My OS is like "D, E, F" or something like that. I have tried using Acronis Boot selector to boot into the OS (it was installed before it all went wrong) but no luck, it wont even recognize that there is a bootable OS on the partition. I tried booting the recovery partition but it says no bootmgr was found. I can get into OSX with ease but only in safe boot mode, nor will it load any of my kexts. I just want to restore my computer to the original vista state. All files are accessible through OSX so I have backed up my documents and pictures. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scj312 Posted October 6, 2008 Share Posted October 6, 2008 Hate to say this, but if you can find a Dell OEM Vista DVD download 'somewhere,' chances are you can use that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ASNNetworks Posted October 6, 2008 Share Posted October 6, 2008 Did you try inserting Mac OSX DVD and typing '-s' at boot, then 'fdisk -e /dev/rdiskX' (X=HDD number) then enter, then flagX (X=partition number with Vista on it) then enter, and then 'write' and enter...and 'quit' enter and finally 'reboot' and then enter Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CompCrasher86 Posted October 6, 2008 Author Share Posted October 6, 2008 ANS I will try yours first. I tried flagging with Acronis but no luck but maybe mac will help me out. Meowy I would dislike greatly to do what you suggest but I will if necessary. I do have a valid key on my oem sticker and everything so it can't be that bad can it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BlackCH Posted October 6, 2008 Share Posted October 6, 2008 You can try to type this in the terminal from your actual OSX installation: fdisk -e /dev/rdiskX [enter]flag SL [enter] write [enter] y [enter] quit [enter] where X is the number of your disk (probably 0 if is an internal laptop HD) and SL is the number of your vista partition. You can retrive this values with Diskutility Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CompCrasher86 Posted October 8, 2008 Author Share Posted October 8, 2008 Neither worked. I ended up booting Gparted, deleting Mac, deleting Dell Diagnostic, and just extended my main partition over both. Took like 3 hours to re-arrange all the data but Vista booted right back up afterwards. Almost losing my laptop really taught me a lesson. Let it be heard that compcrasher86 is done with hackintosh for a very very long time Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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