OS X won't realize that there is a bootable hard drive

F

fadman_12

Registered
I recently tried using my MacBook Pro to insall ubuntu onto an external drive. After restarting, and trying to boot from my mac hard drive, which wasn't touched, it doesn't realize that it is there. All it does is come up with the blinking folder with a question mark icon. When I try holding down the option key to choose the startup disk, it doesn't have anything to choose from unless I have the setup disk in it. I booted the install disk, and told it to boot from the hard drive, but still didn't; came up with the same blinking folder. I ran disk repair, there were no problems. It sees the disk from the boot disc, but that's it. I even tried restoring from the time machine backup, same problem.
Any ideas?
 
Sounds like you wiped your internal drive by accident instead of your external. Boot to the OSX installer and go to utilities/startup disk and does it list your internal HD?
 
...or perhaps instructed the Ubuntu installer program to install a boot-loader (like GRUB) and that boot-loader was erroneously installed on your boot drive instead of the drive you intended to install Ubuntu on.
 
I know that Ubuntu is on the external and that OS X is still on the internal disk. It does show my internal disk under the disk utility when I boot from the system disc. And has it listed as Macintosh HDD 10.5.8. If Ubuntu did install a boot-loader, wouldn't that have been erased when I did the time machine backup and it reformatted my internal drive then reloaded my backup onto it? Do you know of a way to be able to tell if it installed a boot-loader on there though?
 
I finally got it up and running again! I did a time machine restore again, but this time, I formatted the drive under disk utilities instead of just using the reformat that time machine does, restarted the computer, and restored the time machine backup. Booted right up! Thanks for the help.
 
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