Help? When i try to boot in recovery mode with Mountain Lion, i get a dark grey screen with a strange icon.

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Help? When i try to boot in recovery mode with Mountain Lion, i get a dark grey screen with a strange icon.

Please help...Mountain lion 10.8.1 crashed and disk could not be repaired but i was still able to use the recovery mode. i installed a new drive into a different bay so i could use the Recovery Disk to install a fresh Mountain Lion OS on it and then back up my files from Time Machine. Now, when i try to boot in Recovery mode, i get the dark grey tectured screen but with a strange flashing icon (not the "question mark"icon). i have a Snow Leopard disk but my internal DVD doesn't work so i only have an external one. Can i... and will i have to go the long process of installing Snow Leopard from my external dvd drive onto my new drive or is there still hope that i can use my original Recovery Disk?

Also, does anyone know what that icon could be? It flashes between 2 different pictures.

Thank you so much for any help.

MAC PRO 2008

OS X10.8.1

Mac Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.1)

Posted on Sep 8, 2012 5:01 PM

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Answer 1

Sep 8, 2012 5:41 PM in response to elisat13

Elisat13, If you can boot the machine from anything and get to the finder you should be able to install from the ML disk image. Do you have an external HD that you can boot from?

As for the blinking icon can you give us some more details about what it looks like? My first thought was that it was the "question mark" icon but you stated it wasn't. Any description would be helpful.

Paul

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Answer 2

elisat13 Author

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Sep 8, 2012 6:30 PM in response to Paul Conaway

thanks for replying, now i can't boot into Recovery Disk....instead i get the strange symbol / icon / picture on a white retangle with the dark grey screen as background, hard to describe....first picture looks like an arrow is trying to point to a power button....the second symbol or picture has a blow up of a green oval shape with an arrow pointing up. too hard to describe but one appears for several seconds then the other appears....and they keep doing this on a loop.

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Answer 3

Sep 8, 2012 7:24 PM in response to elisat13

Thanks for the description of what you are seeing but it doesn't ring any bells in my head what exactly those icons mean.

Can you boot from a Snow Leapord DVD?

Here is what I would try. The first step is get a disk that you can reliably boot into. You can run the disk utility program directly from the OS installer. http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/Snow_Leopard_Installation_Instructions.pdf - check page 4. I would then run any disk utilities I had on the "Bad" ML drive to see if there is any chance of recovery. If the drive is fixed (at least temperaryly) I would then clone the ML drive to the new disk.

Let me know if I can be of any help.

Have you been able to put any OS on the new drive you installed?

Paul

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