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LoneWolf121188

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 7, 2007
664
0
Longmont, CO
Hi folks. I recently updated my Tuxera NTFS driver, and somehow that seemed to FUBAR my Windows 7 installation (that was the last thing I did before it stopped working). Now when I reboot I just get the single white blinking cursor. It never moves past that; I left it for a full 24 hours and it didn't change.

The problem is that I don't have an optical drive (or media), just a windows 7 iso and a usb drive. I replaced my superdrive with a 120GB Vertex 2 a while back, and have it split with both an OSX and a Win 7 partition. I have a bootable (I think) image of windows 7 on my usb drive, but I can't seem to boot from it to get into startup repair. I can, however, get into my windows install from VMWare, so since that's working fine, the culprit seems to be the MBR or something like that. Any ideas how I can get into a windows recovery environment?

Some diagnostic data:
Code:
diskutil list

/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh Scratch       400.0 GB   disk0s2
   3:       Microsoft Basic Data Windows Scratch         99.8 GB    disk0s3
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *120.0 GB   disk1
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            85.4 GB    disk1s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk1s3
   4:       Microsoft Basic Data Windows                 33.8 GB    disk1s4

sudo gpt -r -vv show disk1

gpt show: disk1: mediasize=120034123776; sectorsize=512; blocks=234441648
gpt show: disk1: Suspicious MBR at sector 0
gpt show: disk1: Pri GPT at sector 1
gpt show: disk1: Sec GPT at sector 234441647
start size index contents
0 1 MBR
1 1 Pri GPT header
2 32 Pri GPT table
34 6
40 409600 1 GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B
409640 166766768 2 GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
167176408 1269544 3 GPT part - 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC
168445952 65994752 4 GPT part - EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7
234440704 911
234441615 32 Sec GPT table
234441647 1 Sec GPT header
 

no1se

macrumors newbie
Jan 5, 2012
7
0
Kitchener, Ontario
Man, I got exactly the same problem. Recently I've replaced the SuperDrive with a 750 GB HDD using the OptiBay adapter in my Early 2011 13" MBP.

I've partitioned my main disk allocating 64 gigs for Windows, then with the presence of an external enclosure for my SuperDrive I tried to install Windows from a DVD. But what I get is what you've described above - blinking _ cursor.

Also I gave a few tries to installing from a thumbdrive, but it does not appear neither in Startup Disk in System Preferences, nor after holding Option key during turning on the computer.
 
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