# Mac Book startup disk won't boot, HD appears fine



## KdawgX (Aug 30, 2009)

In preparing my MacBook currently running Tiger for upgrade to snow leopard I've somehow pooched it. 

The booting sound plays but then I get the flashing folder with a question mark. 

It won't boot in safe mode. It will boot in single user mode
but only from the install disc. 

The weird thing is that from the install disk's disk utility, everything appears normal. The drive appears and both repair and repair permissions run without incident.  

Here's what i did to cause this mess:

I attempted to mount and boot from a disk image I'd just created on an external western digital FireWire drive. 

I unpacked and mounted the drive using the disk utiltiy on the install cd. 
Then I used the startup disk utility to select the second of two identi al 'osx10.xx on Mac' options (the other options being network and the install disk). 

It rebooted normally, but seemingly from the internal, not external hard drive. 

I believe at that point I went back into the utility and selected boot from network. 

Since then, no matter what I've tried the only thing I can boot from is the install disk. 

Any idea what is wrong and how to fix it short of wiping the drive?

Any help is grealty appreciated.


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## stilbite (Aug 31, 2009)

It seems like you have messed up the OS on you Mac.
Snow Leopard requires Leopard already installed if your upgrading if you have the full retail version then you can upgrade from Tiger. I upgraded my Leopard to Snow Leopard and it does not re-boot to a fresh install it just loads and does not require a re-boot afterwards.
I think your best course of action is to try and Archive and Install from your original Tiger disc.. this will hopefully get your OS recognized again and access to your files etc.


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## KdawgX (Aug 31, 2009)

Just to be clear: this was all done with tiger. I have not yet installed snow leopard. 

Any other ideas?


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## Doctor X (Aug 31, 2009)

You somehow frelled your volume.  So you either try to repair it with a repair program such as *Disk Warrior* or *TechTools*, try the *Archive and Install* as suggested, or start over reloading your Tiger.

--J.D.


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## KdawgX (Aug 31, 2009)

Alas archive and install requires at least 5 gigs of disk space.  
I only have about 1.4 gigs because there is a giant folder of material I backed up sitting on the desktop. It's redundant because it's been copied to the external drive. 

Any way through either the install cd or
command line ( I can boot to single user but end up on the install DVD diectory) to navigate to the desktop and delete this folder?


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## Doctor X (Aug 31, 2009)

Boot up from the external drive, go to your internal, find the file, delete it.  Granted, if everything is password protected, you may not "see" it.  It works with my "cloned" Ex-Drive which I access with the same password.

--J.D.


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## KdawgX (Aug 31, 2009)

Unfortunately I can't boot from an external drive. Only the install DVD works. I
going to try reformatting and reloading the disk image. 

Thanks for advice.


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## KdawgX (Sep 1, 2009)

Doctor X

thank you for your patience and help. I've bailed and decided to try and wipe the hard drive and restore the dmg image.  Unfortunately this is easier said than done. Seems to require some combination of checksuming and validation etc. Do you or anyone else have a link to step by step instructions on how to this? Google has thus fair failed me.


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## stilbite (Sep 1, 2009)

The rule of thumb for future reference is always try to have 10% of yuour hard drive free. Running down to 1.4GB is what may be causing the problem in the first place. Do I gather you do not have an Install Tiger disc?
I am not fully sure what you are tryinmg to do with a .dmg file.
Another alternative to salvage your drive before a complete wipe is to get hold of a Fire Wire cable and another Mac.. .. boot the other Mac with the cable attaching both, boot the broken one holding down the 'T' key, this will run Target Mode and mount the Hard Drive on the other Mac, here you can run repairs, delete the folder causing the problems and hopefully get the other running again.


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## KdawgX (Sep 1, 2009)

An update:

Everything appears to be back to normal.

I have successfully restored the backup .dmg image of the hard drive.

I found online documentation on how to actually do the restore, and the process counter intutative.

Long story short:

Drag an drop of hard drive to restore to, doesn't seem to work if you boot from the system disk in Tiger... solution: I used the yet to be installed Snow Leopard system disk to perform the restore.

Second issue: You can't restore from a read/write image. You need to convert it to a compressed or read only image.

Once I realized these two things, I was off to the races. Very scary that you can pooch this thing that easily.

I suspect archive and restore might have worked, had I not had a full hard drive.

thanks again.


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## jbarley (Sep 1, 2009)

stilbite said:


> It seems like you have messed up the OS on you Mac.
> Snow Leopard requires Leopard already installed if your upgrading if you have the full retail version then you can upgrade from Tiger. I upgraded my Leopard to Snow Leopard and it does not re-boot to a fresh install it just loads and does not require a re-boot afterwards.
> I think your best course of action is to try and Archive and Install from your original Tiger disc.. this will hopefully get your OS recognized again and access to your files etc.



Snow Leopard does not require any previous operating system to be installed.
The standard upgrade version $29US or $35Can will happily install on any properly newly formatted drive on an INTEL mac.
It appears that Apple changed the rules sometime just before releasing SL, so now the only reason to buy the retail boxed set is if you need ilife, iwork, etc.


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## stilbite (Sep 3, 2009)

jbarley.. it seems you are 100% CORRECT. I re-partitioned my MacBook 15in last night and via target mode on another MacBook installed Snow to a complete clean Hard Drive. My DVD is not reading Install Discs hence the TM option but I now have Snow running without the need for a pre-installed Leopard.


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