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Mac doesn't boot

S

sherisdoppel

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 29, 2010
19
0
Boot Camp Utility from Mac went mad itself and now it ruined my partition table.

Via Boot Camp Utility, I merged the Mac partition with windows partition. Just to make sure everything went smooth, I used command-line program from Terminal and figured my Mac Partition was labeled as "Microsoft Basic Data". I thought it was weird but the Mac OS X was running without any troubles so I reboot my machine, then my Mac was never able to boot again.

After a long wait during the boot, it shows an icon of a question mark within a folder. I restored my Windows from backup image and figured the Mac partition is labeled as HFS sized as 465GB!
My MacBook Pro (i7 15") is clearly a 500GB HDD (or technically 465GB), and according to Windows, its HDD has a partition of Windows (301GB) and another partition of non-bootable Mac (465GB).

I know the partition table has gone mad and I have a dmg file of Mac OS X which could be used to repair the Mac partition.

I bought 10 DVD+R DL's and tried third-party tools to burn dmg file as a bootable disc and nothing seemed to work. Of course, if dmg file was a compressed image, those tools would had decompressed first.
When trying to boot from the burnt disc, pressing 'c', 'd', 'SHIFT', or 'OPTION' key never worked.

I'm doing this because the DVD came with my MacBook got lost.
The main purpose of this whole procedures is to make my Mac bootable again.
So if any of the experts from this forum knows how to do any of the following please help me:
1. Creating a bootable disc of Mac OS X in Windows.
2. Repairing the Mac partition in my situation.
3. Make the Mac bootable again.

Thanks in advance.
 
Your best bet is to take it into a Genius Bar to get fixed. If that's not possible for you, I suggest buying Snow Leopard again. It's only 29$ and I'm guessing your time and effort is more valuable than that per hour.
 
666sheep said:
You need minimum 10.6.2 for your i7. It won't boot from any version below.
To burn bootable .dmg in Win, you can use this method.
Click to expand...

That is the exact software I used to burn. The version of the Mac OS X in dmg format is 10.6.3.

woosah said:
Did you erase Windows before merging the partitions?
Click to expand...

Nope. It was running perfectly fine.

mrbash said:
Your best bet is to take it into a Genius Bar to get fixed. If that's not possible for you, I suggest buying Snow Leopard again. It's only 29$ and I'm guessing your time and effort is more valuable than that per hour.
Click to expand...

I'm outside of US and there is also Apple Center so I contacted them but they told me it would take at least 2 weeks to get it shipped.

Thanks guys for trying to help me.
My problem still hasn't been solved. Any help will be really appreciated.
 
sherisdoppel said:

Originally Posted by woosah:
Did you erase Windows before merging the partitions?

Nope. It was running perfectly fine.
Click to expand...

Windows must be deleted before merging the partitions. Bootcamp does this via a step by step process before actually merging them. I'm not familiar with using Terminal to merge partitions, but if you didn't manually erase and reformat the windows NFTS partition before merging it with your HFS+ partition (if that's possible), well, I would think that's why your Mac won't boot.
 
woosah said:
Windows must be deleted before merging the partitions. Bootcamp does this via a step by step process before actually merging them. I'm not familiar with using Terminal to merge partitions, but if you didn't manually erase and reformat the windows NFTS partition before merging it with your HFS+ partition (if that's possible), well, I would think that's why your Mac won't boot.
Click to expand...

What I mean was that Windows partition was not manually erased nor the OS was deleted before merging it with the utility.
I tried merging it via Boot Camp utility several times and this is the only time.

Just a thought, would burning the DVD+RDL in high speed have affected my MacBook not to boot from the DVD drive?
 
sherisdoppel said:
What I mean was that Windows partition was not manually erased nor the OS was deleted before merging it with the utility.
I tried merging it via Boot Camp utility several times and this is the only time.

Just a thought, would burning the DVD+RDL in high speed have affected my MacBook not to boot from the DVD drive?
Click to expand...

I stick with my above statement as to why you're having the problems, but to answer your question, yes. Bootable disks should always be made at slow speeds. But, DVD's don't burn well at slow speeds, so it's a toss up. :D
 
I tried to burn it with low speed but it wasn't much of a help.
Is there any other way?
 
sherisdoppel said:
I tried to burn it with low speed but it wasn't much of a help.
Is there any other way?
Click to expand...

Not that I can think of. I mean, if you don't have your original disks, you can't burn a disk, and you can't boot from your drive, you're out of "do it yourself" options. Call Apple and see if they'll send you some disks.
 
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