OS 10.5 will not boot. Grey screen with "no" symbol. Please help.

[Pumpkin King]

I no longer can boot into 10.5. I get stuck at the grey screen with the apple logo and clock that eventually changes to the "no" symbol and clock. The only fixes I found online (that I understood) were to repair the disk and permissions using the install disk. I tried this with no luck.

I am willing to reinstall OS X but I do not want to lose my Windows partition. I have the Windows 7 beta and no longer have the ISO disk and am not sure if I can redownload that anymore. Either way, I'd rather not have to reinstall Windows too.

So please, if anyone has any suggestions to get me to boot into OS X let me know. Otherwise, can I reinstall OS X without effecting the Windows partition???

FYI - I lost the ability to boot OSX soon after I installed the Windows Home Server disk on the OSX partition. The new HP servers claim to be compatible with OSX... maybe not so much yet.

 

[animaxcg]

hold "apple v" on start up.
if that doesn't work do an achieve install it won't hurt windows 7

 

[wrldwzrd89]

hold "apple v" on start up.
if that doesn't work do an achieve install it won't hurt windows 7

After you hold Apple+V to boot into verbose mode, the system will print a bunch of diagnostic messages. These will help us diagnose the cause of your issue.

If you end up needing to perform an Archive and Install (not "achieve install") make sure you have enough free space for the archive (you'll need 10-20 GB) and select the Preserve Users and Network Settings option when installing - this'll save you some real headaches later.

Also, animaxcg is correct. Regardless of how you installed Windows 7 (through Boot Camp or a virtual machine), an Archive and Install will not prevent your Windows 7 installation from working.

 

[sickmacdoc]

There is a good Apple document called "Resolve startup issues and perform disk maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck" located here with details about how to best proceed from your point which will involve the use of Command-S to enter single user mode and then using the fsck command. It can take care of a lot of disk issues that Disk Utility is not able to handle.

BTW- If it finally comes down to reinstalling OSX, doing that will not affect your BootCamp partition as the installer will do its work in the main OSX partition. Just make sure you choose that when it asks you where to install! Technically though that is not a concern as the installer will not allow you to proceed with and installation of OSX on the BootCamp partition even by accident really!

 

[Pumpkin King]

Thanks for the advice. Using Apple-V or Apple-S, I do not get to any command line. It gets stuck on "still waiting for root device".

I'm going to assume that I'm pretty hosed at this point and do the archive install. Thanks for the help!