First off let me confess I am pretty useless with this stuff compared to the people here. I have searched the forums and while there seem to be a lot of people with similar problems, I haven't really seen a solution that I fully understand or that would help me with my specific problem.
The Problem:
I'm using a 3 month old 13.3" Macbook with bootcamp installed. Recently I turned it on and OSX wouldn't load. I had not changed anything on the laptop at all. When it tried to load just got the grey/ blue screen and spinning gear thing. I turned it off and booted into windows no problem. Later I did it again but left it running and eventually OSX did load but the problem recurred when I shut down and now the OSX partition doesn't even show up when I start the computer. Nothing happens for a while and then windows starts. No OSX.
What I've tried:
After looking through the forums here I have tried booting into safe mode and single userness, whatever that is, and it's the same- nothing happens and then windows starts.
I've tried booting from the install disk and running disk utility on the mac partition (it shows up in disk utility) but I get the "invalid node structure" error and it says the disk can't be repaired. When I try to verify I get an error saying the disk "could not be unmounted" (I assume that is a euphemism).
Windows works just fine.
What I really want to know is whether I need to reinstall OSX and, if so, whether I can recover some data first. I just got back from a family wedding and have a number of photos that I hadn't backed up (duh) and I really want to try and get them off the disk.
I understand Diskwarrior might work, but I don't mind reinstalling OSX as long as I can back up the drive first. I have an external USB drive, but absolutely no idea what I would have to do to use it as a backup, or how to recover the photos from it if I do. There is mention on these forums of an "archive/install" option which sounds promising...
Sorry for the long post, just wanted to be specific. Thanks in advance to anyone who can offer advice.
The Problem:
I'm using a 3 month old 13.3" Macbook with bootcamp installed. Recently I turned it on and OSX wouldn't load. I had not changed anything on the laptop at all. When it tried to load just got the grey/ blue screen and spinning gear thing. I turned it off and booted into windows no problem. Later I did it again but left it running and eventually OSX did load but the problem recurred when I shut down and now the OSX partition doesn't even show up when I start the computer. Nothing happens for a while and then windows starts. No OSX.
What I've tried:
After looking through the forums here I have tried booting into safe mode and single userness, whatever that is, and it's the same- nothing happens and then windows starts.
I've tried booting from the install disk and running disk utility on the mac partition (it shows up in disk utility) but I get the "invalid node structure" error and it says the disk can't be repaired. When I try to verify I get an error saying the disk "could not be unmounted" (I assume that is a euphemism).
Windows works just fine.
What I really want to know is whether I need to reinstall OSX and, if so, whether I can recover some data first. I just got back from a family wedding and have a number of photos that I hadn't backed up (duh) and I really want to try and get them off the disk.
I understand Diskwarrior might work, but I don't mind reinstalling OSX as long as I can back up the drive first. I have an external USB drive, but absolutely no idea what I would have to do to use it as a backup, or how to recover the photos from it if I do. There is mention on these forums of an "archive/install" option which sounds promising...
Sorry for the long post, just wanted to be specific. Thanks in advance to anyone who can offer advice.
