need a little help lads

[cruisej]

Hi all so I have had my mid 2010 27" imac for my company since new just recently I let my son install Bootcamp to play his computer games on, just this morning when I went to boot it up it gets stuck on the loading screen with the spinning wheel I have held down the option key and ran the disk utility but it says the classic Disk utility cant repair this disk back up and reformat. I know I also should have been regularly using time machine to back everything up but haven't since I got it I have also tried to reinstall the OS but it comes up with disc locked please tell me there is a way to save the information on my mac I have a lot of important documents is there any way to get my mac going again or just save some of the information on my hard drive? I also tried the search bar before posting here so go easy on me cheers lads.

 

[MacsRgr8]

Do you have another Mac, or know anyone with Mac?
If you do, you could try to boot the defective iMac into Target Disk Mode (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1661), and hook it via FireWire to the other Mac.
The other Mac "sees" the internal HD of the iMac as an external volume and copy files off it as a backup.

 

[cruisej]

unfortunately I do not have another mac only pc's

 

[Shane1905]

Do you have another Mac, or know anyone with Mac?
If you do, you could try to boot the defective iMac into Target Disk Mode (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1661), and hook it via FireWire to the other Mac.
The other Mac "sees" the internal HD of the iMac as an external volume and copy files off it as a backup.

Would that work using windows if the windows machine was running software that let it read OS extended journaled? Maybe worth a shot, nothing to lose. MacDrive has a free trial...

 

[Jexta]

Would that work using windows if the windows machine was running software that let it read OS extended journaled? Maybe worth a shot, nothing to lose. MacDrive has a free trial...

This would only work in the unlikely event that the Windows machine had a firewire port.

Best option would be to buy an external HDD, use the OS disk to install a working operating system on the external HDD and boot from that. Then you should be able to see the critical files and back them up before performing a wipe and reload of the internal drive.

 

[cruisej]

ok so a bit of an update when I turned on the mac this morning it weirdly booted straight into windows instead of mac osx without fail last night I could not boot into either os anyway because i am now in windows i was able to install macdrive and scan my mac hard drive and recover my files macdrive was not able to repair the mac hdd and says this volume may need to be formatted/ mac hdd was not safely disconnected when last used files on this volume may contain errors? not sure what that means I have the 1tb seagate hdd when my boy installed bootcamp he allocated 200gb for windows and the rest 800gb for mac osx it is weird because it says through macdrive i have used 745 gb of space on my mac hdd there is no way that's possible with only word documents and pictures i am confused as to why my hdd is full I searched around a bit and found that apple did a recall on my model imac with possible hdd faults I am beginning to think this is the cause.

 

[Tumbleweed666]

ok so a bit of an update when I turned on the mac this morning it weirdly booted straight into windows instead of mac osx without fail last night I could not boot into either os anyway because i am now in windows i was able to install macdrive and scan my mac hard drive and recover my files macdrive was not able to repair the mac hdd and says this volume may need to be formatted/ mac hdd was not safely disconnected when last used files on this volume may contain errors? not sure what that means I have the 1tb seagate hdd when my boy installed bootcamp he allocated 200gb for windows and the rest 800gb for mac osx it is weird because it says through macdrive i have used 745 gb of space on my mac hdd there is no way that's possible with only word documents and pictures i am confused as to why my hdd is full I searched around a bit and found that apple did a recall on my model imac with possible hdd faults I am beginning to think this is the cause.

Thank goodness I was using scuba gear whilst reading this, or I would have run out of breath and suffocated.

Next time try full stops, commas, paragraphs, that kind of thing.

Obviously your boy done bad. Reformat and restore from your TM or other backup.

 

[cruisej]

Thank goodness I was using scuba gear whilst reading this, or I would have run out of breath and suffocated.

Next time try full stops, commas, paragraphs, that kind of thing.

Obviously your boy done bad. Reformat and restore from your TM or other backup.

I came to this "website" looking for answers, not trolls. The dilemma has been solved anyway, turns out it was a defective HDD, Apple kindly replaced it free of charge, and I did not loose my documents.