cant boot macbook pro with leopard! please help!

gm1644 · #1 February 19th, 2009, 03:36 AM

i am having a huge problem with my macbook pro running leopard. i was originally trying to partition my hardrive for windows with boot camp but that failed cause it "couldnt move files" so i ran disk utility with the installation disk to fix the harddrive.

anyways next thing i know i boot my computer and it stops at the blue login screen before it has the option to login with the spinning wheel and does a loop of blue screens with spinning wheel. wont boot in safe mode and it always stops at the same screen. so i looked around on the web and it sounded like a had to archive and install. so i did that and then half an hour in it told me i had a corrupt file and i had to restart.

so i restarted and then it brought me straight to the leopard installation screen and told me that "mac osx cannot be upgraded to v10.5 on your computer" because "macosx 10.4 or later could not be found"!!! i used the disk util to repair the hard drive but it said everything was fine. i cant safe boot, it wont give me the option to archive and install again its only giving me the option to erase my whole harddrive!

pleeease help! i have not backed up in 2 months! is there anyway to get this to start up or back up some files from this point?

dadidoe · #2 February 19th, 2009, 05:20 AM

if you havent backed it up you can't restore it. I use TechTool Pro. brilliant app, helped me out when my hard drive failed because you can boot from it. It has all sorts of useful apps to help you with hard drive problems. thats all i can think of

gm1644 · #3 February 19th, 2009, 12:09 PM

can anyone think if anything else to do?

Doctor X · #4 February 19th, 2009, 12:26 PM

Sacrifice a virgin?

1. Go and purchase an external HD. The cost will be about the same as your next purchase.
2. While TT is not a bad idea, it usually "likes" to work on its rescue disc that is created on your HD as a separate partition. Creating this is a BAD THING on what you have now. So you must consider getting Disk Warrior--use it as directed to take a "picture" of your HD--It will try to recover files that you can then inspect. Send those to your Ex-HD.
3. Clean and install.

--J.D.