Accidentally Erased Mac and Windows Partition!

J

jbl0605

Registered
I recently tried to resize my windows partition on my macbook pro with OSX 10.5.8 Leopard using Winclone. I went to choose the partition in boot camp that I wanted to add windows to, and I chose the wrong one. When it was almost finished I realized I did not choose the correct partition as is specified in the boot camp instructions from apple, and I panicked and clicked escape and the power button. I went to reboot and got the error message saying non-system disk, press any key to reboot.

At this point, I've backed up all my files and everyone previously to doing this because I knew something bad was likely to happen. I just want to do a system restore, and I'm pretty sure I've messed up the mac partition pretty bad.

Now when I start it and hold down the option button, A windows part comes up but nothing happens when I try to select it. If I don't hold down the option button, I get the error message I mentioned above

Any ideas of what I can do...other than to never trust myself with my computer ever again?

Thank you!
 
Non system disk would likely mean that the Windows partition got erased. Have you tried to go to the boot picker by powering up and holding down the option key to see what volumes showed? What kind of backup did you do for the Mac side? Was it a time machine backup or a disk image of the OSX volume?
 
When I hold down the option key I get a windows partition, but I can't click on it. I think I overwrote the mac partition with the windows one I was creating, but like I said I panicked and when I realized I was doing it, it was at 97%. Somehow I canceled it, or it stopped before completing.

If I put in my MAC OSX install disk, that shows up when I press the option button on startup, but again, does nothing if I click on it.

I backed up all of my files on a thumb drive, and I used winclone to back up my windows partition.

Thanks for any advice!
 
From what you are describing you are going to have to start from scratch and reload OSX, then run bootcamp setup again, then restore your Windows partition back from the Winclone image. If there is something that you think you might not have backed up you are going to have to run some data recovery software like Data Rescue 3 before reloading anything. You did save the Winclone image on an external HD, right?
 
Thanks for your response! When I received it last night I had gotten to the point of contemplating doing a complete system restore like you suggested and you affirmed that thought.

I somehow was able to reformat the mac osx partition using disk utility and pretty much wiped everything clean. Then I used bootcamp to add a new (MUCH LARGER) partition. I got into this mess because I was running camtasia and only had 5G of space in the partition. Now I've got 25. Windclone worked PERFECTLY. I had the image saved to a usb drive, and I saved all my mac files in zip folders before doing anything.

And now I know to use time machine. :0)
Thanks for your replies!
 
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