Help!!! Partition nightmare!

phenominc

Registered
Hey guys. I know this is my first post, but I had no where else to go on the internet.

My problem is, I was trying to install Windows XP on Leopard for boot camp. Something went wrong and now it gives a message saying "no bootable device".
Its almost like its confused to where its booting from. So now, it won't boot past the white screen with the apple logo - that doesn't even appear! Its a grey screen that goes to a black screen which reads that message. I can't get into OSX.

I think I may of partitioned the drive and whiped the computer clean, but being a casual computer person I have no idea what to do.

I have my original Mac OSX disc that came with the computer.

Any help would be appreciated!
 
Try holding down the 'option' key as the computer boots. You should be presented with icons representing bootable volumes.

If your Mac OS X partition shows up, simply click it and your computer should boot into OS X. From there, you can open the "Startup Disk" pane of the System Preferences and re-select your OS X hard drive (so your computer will successfully boot into OS X without intervention the next time you restart your computer).

If your Mac OS X partition does not show up, that could mean one of a few different things. It may mean that you somehow formatted or erased the OS X partition. It may mean that your hard drive is failing. It may mean any number of things -- more than likely that somehow you erased and/or deleted something important from the OS X partition.

"No bootable device" usually is an error message that Windows provides when there's something wrong with a Windows installation. It looks like your Windows partition isn't quite right, and your computer keeps trying to boot to the Windows partition. The 'option' key method I mentioned above should get you back to OS X (if everything's cool with the OS X partition), and at that point, you can re-try to install Windows via Boot Camp.

Be aware of the requirements for Boot Camp installations and ensure that you meet all of them (specifically, you must install Windows XP Service Pack 2 or later -- vanilla XP or SP1 won't work correctly).

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1899
 
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