Q: start up disk image missing
I'm pretty certain I'm going to need to erase and reinstall Snow Leapord. I'm wondering if it's worth my time to go to an Apple store to try to retrieve any files out of my hard drive (if that's still possible).
I have a 15" macbook pro I bought in 2011. I have 16G after market ram. Everything else is standard. No problems until now (and this is my fault).
It is partitioned with 112G for windows and I am currently on that side unable to get back to the mac side because the start up disk for the mac no longer shows up. Disk utility cannot find it. Diskwarrior cannot find it. Internet recovery cannot find it and doesn't show any partition. Internet recovery did show a drive (fire wire symbol) of 12G and was unable to repair it.
If I try to boot from the install cd I get a grey screen with three beeps. I replaced the current ram with the original and still got the beeps. But then I'm using the new ram on the windows side right now with no problems. While in internet recovery, I still get the three beeps if I try to install while keeping my files. I haven't tried reformating and reinstalling yet because my files aren't backed up and I want to know if any of them can be saved before erasing everything.
Pretty cool huh!
What I did; I was trying to add more space to the windows side of the partiton. I backed up that side and used boot camp to erase and repartition the windows side. I reinstalled windows and recovered my backup files, but not everything showed up. So I installed a mirror image for windows, not realizing this would change it back to the original hard drive size. Restoring from the mirror took about 24 hours! No exaggeration, my external hard drive is OLD. Well, I tried resizing in boot camp again, installing windows and the back up and the same thing happened (of course). So I restored from the mirror again. Only this time when the mirror looked like it was going to take another 24 hours I stopped the process. This is where I think I wrecked the mac side of things.
I think evrything may still be there, but I wrecked all the pathways to them. I don't think I reformatted the whole disk.
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.5)
Posted on Aug 4, 2013 11:45 AM
