iMac won't boot osx

[Luud]

Hello

 

today I totally screwed up my intel based iMac. I'll try to make myself clear and get you to understand what stupid things I did.

 

google launched its OS, I was pretty curious (mostly because the screenshots looked a lot like OSX) and I wanted to install it next to leopard on my mac. I did not have windows running on it and only had one partition: iMac HD (+ the EFI partition).

First I used the bootcamp assistent to create a 10GB partition. Which is stupid, since gOS is linux, which runs on ext2. After I turned the fat partition into ext2 in the gOS installer and after installing the new OS, it would not boot. So I decided to give up and I installed it on my Windows PC instead.

Back to the mac: back in OSX i wanted to get the 10gb back to my main partition for osx, bootcamp assistent was not able to do this and told me to use the disk utility. So i did, and somehow I screwed things up... When I thought everything was normal again and rebooted the computer I got the message 'error loading operating system', which i also got first time trying to boot gOS. Booting pressing the option key did not help, since the only option I was given was a windows drive (huh?) from which it could not boot. When I booted the iMac from the gOS disk I saw the icon of my harddrive, but it was empty! But still, it tells me that 107gb is in use, so my data is still on there... somewhere. (ofcourse i don't have any backups. by next week i'll have a firewire disk and will i be using timemachine). Ok, so I booted my computer with the tiger-disc that came with my iMac. When I go to the disk-util I can see my harddrive, which is still 1 partition (no EFI partition anymore I think). When I checked out the tab partitioning I found out, after clicking the option button, that it was converted into a MBR drive instead of a GPT (or GTP?) drive. I can turn it into a GPT drive, and click the partition button... but, will I lose all my data if I do? And would I be able to boot from it again? Or would you rather suggest me to go to the nearest apple centre and let those people help me?

 

Thanks for your time

 

ps. I'm dutch, i did not check for any mistakes, but sorry if my english isn't 100 percent perfect.

 

Luud

[scj312]

If you have another mac, you can use it as firewire target disk mode, transfer the files onto another mac, and then reformat your iMac. You're going to have to reformat (read: lose everything).

 

If you bring it into an apple store genius bar, im sure they can hook it up into target disk mode and help you get your stuff off.

[Luud]

i have my macbook (which i am using now) and i considered using target disk mode (have to buy a cable first)... but i'm not sure it will help, since in gOS the disk is empty. meaning no files are shown, but still 107gb are in use. I heard there is a partition table in which information on how data is ordered on your harddrive and without that table your data is unaccessible. I am afraid I lost that table, and I don't know how to regain it. But I'll try tomorrow

[SpeedfreaK]

i had a similair problem with an imac dv which won't boot and the dvd drive was broken. just use target disk mode and install os x (maybe you need to reformat, so you will lose all your data).ps: i read somewhere that it's gOS and it is a hoax that the g stands for Google. the g is stands for green. So it isn't from google

[Suhail]

It's not from google but it just features loads of Google's freebies. The OS itself was pretty rubbish IMHO.