[SOLVED] Old iDeneb Install does not boot

[Drostin77]

[EDIT]

 

Didn't see a delete button so I'm just editing. Solved this myself by installing grub (yes this is like 1 minute after I made the post, I thought nothing I had done was working, but realized right after posting that this was a stupid mistake and grub was in fact working to boot my old os x install). Sorry for the wasted post, if mods want to feel free to delete!

 

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So I was away from my desktop for ~ 5 months. It was running an old iDeneb (1.5.4 mb?). I don't remember it having any problems aside from the occasional crash-during-shutdown, but when I was reunited with it it did not boot, specifically it hangs at:

 

Verifying dmi pool data...

 

As I understand it this message (or hanging at this message) can mean one of two things: some piece of hardware is loose/broken/unhappy, or it cannot find anything to boot ( a bootloader).

 

To ensure it was not shady hardware I booted a live-usb of ubuntu, and it booted fine.

 

So the problem appears to be that its not finding a bootloader. Back in the live-usb I confirmed that there is a 200MB partition called EFI alive and well on the hard disk. I'm kind of at a loss here, its been a long time since I was really into making this machine work as a mac, I've been using linux exclusively during the 6-month interim.

 

Is there a way I could use a usb-stick or cd as a bootload for the existing install, or any other way to repair this install?

 

Also all the data is backed-up, so I would also consider an in-place upgrade if thats a viable option.

 

I realize this might not be enough information but I'm not sure what other information is needed. Thanks a bunch to anyone who helps and I'll be happy to answer any follow-up questions as best I can.

 

P.S. One other potentially important piece of info: the cmos battery died during these 6-months (clock was crazy), so I suspect my bios was flashed back to default, though I do not specifically remember any major changes to the bios perhaps there were some?