overlookhotel Posted June 27, 2006 Share Posted June 27, 2006 hi all. i really hope someone can help. i was trying to install 10.4.6 hotiso through vmware. i selected the whole of my hard disc for the virtual machine to have access and made it 'independent, persistent'. i booted hotiso disc within vmware and used disk utility to format the last partition on the drive as hfs journalled. when i rebooted the machine it would not do anything - just showed a few random blocks of blue on the screen with some characters in them. neither osx nor windows xp will boot. the really stupid thing is that in my haste to get my hands on lovely os x, i made the cardinal sin of not backing up my windows partitions before i did all this. stupid stupid stupid. now i am in the dreadful situation of being away from home with a locked machine containing a bunch of files i need. i have no windows xp install disc with me to try the MBR repair options that it contains, and furthermore the machine is a laptop with no working cd or dvd drive so it's hard to boot off any rescue discs. my first priority is to recover the files of the windows partitions, second priority to get windows up and running again so i can re-attempt the osx install. this is as far as i've got: have put my hard drive into another laptop which does have a dvd drive. only problem is that since the drive is in another machine, it's impossible to tell if the windows partition is working or not since xp will only boot on the machine it was installed on. i've downloaded knoppix and hiren's boot disc. i've tried booting into the windows partition using boot magic on hiren's disc but that just produces a black screen. i've tried using one of the partition tools to install a bootloader but that failed to find any partitions. i'm assuming that the MBR has got corrupted somehow so i've tried 'fdisk /mbr' under DOS but to no avail. fdisk (under DOS) shows 3 partitions of different types 1. NTFS 2. HIDDEN32 3. Unknown this looks about right - my first partition was win xp, the second was FAT32 and the third must be the bungled osx install. in knoppix no drives mount at all and when i tried 'fdisk /dev/hda' i get: "unable to open /dev/hda" does anyone please have any idea how i can begin to sort out this mess? thanks, jim Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/20617-help-computer-now-totally-unbootable/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikeh Posted June 28, 2006 Share Posted June 28, 2006 The first thing that comes to mind is Linux live CD. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/20617-help-computer-now-totally-unbootable/#findComment-136415 Share on other sites More sharing options...
belgrano Posted June 28, 2006 Share Posted June 28, 2006 Knoppix is a Linux live cd... overlookhotel are you sure the NTFS partition is not hidden too? Why don't you erase the OS X partition? And then make the NTFS active... Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/20617-help-computer-now-totally-unbootable/#findComment-136466 Share on other sites More sharing options...
WRX1KNP Posted June 28, 2006 Share Posted June 28, 2006 Hi Jim Just to back up a bit here: >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>my first priority is to recover the files of the windows partitions, second priority to get windows up and running again so i can re-attempt the osx install. this is as far as i've got: have put my hard drive into another laptop which does have a dvd drive. only problem is that since the drive is in another machine, it's impossible to tell if the windows partition is working or not since xp will only boot on the machine it was installed on. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Have you fitted it as the SECOND DISK in another laptop or desktop? If the data is really critical, buy an IDE adaptor (just a plug, should be cheap!) at a computer parts / repair store that allows one to fit a laptop IDE drive (small plug) onto a standard (large plug) desktop IDE cable. Then install it as the SECOND DRIVE on a desktop machine. Boot the machine NORMALY using WinXp (or 2000, Server 2003, whateva) and use Admin Tools / Disk Management to make sure you are seeing your second (OSX screwed up laptop) drive. You should the be able to access this as Drive E: (or whatever Drive letter you assigned with Disk Management) and find your data under Documents and Settings .. /./.. My documents. COPY THE DATA TO SOMEPLACE SAFE LIKE THE PRIMARY DRIVE!!! We recover folks trashed laptops drives data (won't boot, O/S messed up) often like this. Then try fix you MBR later. Sounds like it's definitely clobbered. Hope this helps! - Rob Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/20617-help-computer-now-totally-unbootable/#findComment-136585 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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