my macbook air is not booting- can i boot from time machine?

Question

my macbook air is not booting- can i boot from time machine?

i partitioned my hard drive with boot camp. then i installed vista. for whatever reason vista can not recognize the multifinger mouse gestures (like two finger scrolling, and two finger tap for right click- in fact it will not do one finger tap for normal click). i installed vmware fusion- then vista connects to my wireless base station and the mouse works.

then this morning it will not boot from the mac side at all!

it boots from the pc side through boot camp though. i have an external attached to the airport base station-- question is:

can i boot from time machine- knowing that i cannot select restore from the mac as it will not boot. it gets to the gray screen with the gray apple and the spinning dial underneath. i have an os x disc- at school, 13 hours away. please offer some advice. apple support page has never let me down before- thank you all!

macbook air, Mac OS X (10.5.6), 2g ram

Posted on Dec 21, 2008 9:03 AM

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Answer 1

V.K.

Level 9

56,174 points

Dec 21, 2008 9:25 AM in response to James McKinstry

TM backups are not bootable. you can restore your system from the backups but you need the install disks for that there is no way around that. try the following. reboot and hold option at the chime. this will boot you into the startup disk manager. do you see the os x drive as a possible boot disk. if so select it and try booting.

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Answer 2

Dec 21, 2008 9:33 AM in response to V.K.

I do that. It sees both the mac and vista drives. I select the mac drive and it never fully loads. How? Why? I deleted nothing. It is like MS ruined my mac, ha!

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Answer 3

V.K.

Level 9

56,174 points

Dec 21, 2008 9:53 AM in response to James McKinstry

try booting in single user mode. reboot and hold command+s at the chime. this should boot you into single user mode. it will look like a black screen with some white text. wait for it to finish and then enter the following at the prompt

fsck -fy /

this is the command to repair the drive. let it work. if it reports any errors run it again till there are none. when finished enter

reboot

to reboot the computer. see if it boots normally now.

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Answer 4

Dec 21, 2008 10:22 AM in response to V.K.

fsck -fy /
that brings up this:
/ is not a character device
Continue? yes

** / (no write)
Cannot read: BLK 16
Continue? Yes

The following disk sectors could not be read: 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31,
ioctl (gcinfo): Inappropriate ioctl for device
fsck: /: can't read disk label

When I type in: fsck -fy it goes:
** /dev/rdisk0s2
** root file system
** checking journaled HSF Plus volume
** checking extents overflow file
** checking catalog file
** checking multi-linked files
** checking catalog hierarchy
** checking extended attributes file
** checking volume bitmap
** checking volume information
** the volume Macintosh HD appears to be ok

But still nothing. Anything else? I hope...

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Answer 5

V.K.

Level 9

56,174 points

Dec 21, 2008 10:27 AM in response to James McKinstry

sorry, you don't need the / in the command. well the disk seems to be fine. I would repair permissions next but you need the install disk for that. but there is nothing else you can do without the install disk. go get the disk.

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Answer 6

Dec 21, 2008 10:36 AM in response to V.K.

That is odd, because I repaired permissions last night.

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Answer 7

V.K.

Level 9

56,174 points

Dec 21, 2008 10:40 AM in response to James McKinstry

then you likely have to do a restore from TM. you still need the install disk for that. there is nothing further you can do without it.

BTW, did you change permissions or sharing on anything on the os x drive before this happened?

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Answer 8

Dec 21, 2008 10:57 AM in response to V.K.

No, I did not. It does seem odd that I cannot restore from time machine without the disks. Oh well thanks for trying.

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