Darwin bootloader no longer shows up

[dawntodon]

Before I reinstall OSX for the umpteenth time, I was hoping I could ask the wise folks at the insanelymac forum for help on getting back on track without a reinstall. Bear with me here since I vaguely remember the details and everything happened so fast before I found myself in this mess.

 

At the point of installation, I had successfully updated my OS to 10.5.5 and then installed a few kexts to recover access to my laptop's keyboard and mouse. I then initiated Time Machine so that I could finally cover my butt in the event that I encounter a kernel panic and can't boot into safe mode. My level of expertise regarding OS X is at the point where once I find that I can't even boot into OS X using safe mode, it's time for a reinstall. I'm sure there are ways of repairing it using terminal, but I'm beyond that.

 

That said, when rebooting upon initiating Time Machine, there was a snag in the shutdown process where I was given a message regarding closing down an SWF thingy. I looked swf up and it seems it's related to java, which led me to suspect that it's related to my copy of Vuze which was open at the time of shutting down.

 

Here's the kicker: once I rebooted, the hard drive led just blinked at the same rate a car blinker would blink -- steadily and slowly. Even worse than a kernel panic, the Darwin bootloader just refused to even show.

 

If I could at least get back to the point where Darwin bootloader loads, I'd be a happy as a gadfly. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[nintenno]

go to terminal on ur install cd

use fdisk to try and set the active partition

or if that doesnt work

use terminal to install the files for the darwin bootloader

or

make a boot 132 cd and boot it

then press escape until you can enter a number

enter a number 80 and above depending on what hd ur on

then im pretty sure it will work (im not as confident in this method)

[dawntodon]

thanks nintenno for the advice. I ran the install dvd and found that time machine had kept a backup intact. Unfortunately, however, I found that the volume that os x used to be in is completely gone or unreadable from the installer. I had renamed the volume from the desktop,which was named disk0s4, to "main drive." Neither of those names appear in the list when I loaded disk utility, or tried to reload the time machine install or when doing a "ls" upon going into /volumes. Is the partition completely gone or is there a way to restore the partition first since I also have a partition with Vista on it, which does appear but can't be booted into since I used Darwin bootloader for that before this incident.