help! cant start-up after attempted bootcamp install

[noodleculture]

hi,

i messed up bad. i have a 2.4 mbp (pen). i use 10.5 leopard and vmware with 1 virtual xp and 1 bootcamp xp. they both worked fine. but my initial bootcamp xp i only did 5gb and needed more to run halflife 2 so didnt mind. but last night i finally dedicated the time to try and make another with more room but i think i used the wrong windows disc. (un-supported i think). i searched the forums and couldn't really find a solution besides going to the apple store for a genius or applecare. i don't have applecare.

any ways i started the bootcamp assistant and chose install windows. went all the way to where it wanted to format my entire drive so i thought i made a mistake and exited thinking i should go back and do some disk utility stuff.
now i get only a black screen with the white cursor. also when i power on and hold option theres no osx. doh!

i feel like a donkey because i didnt even backup my stuff using time machine and my fw hd.

does anyone know how to fix this?

Thanks

John B

 

[stevey500]

Black screen, white cursor... that's windows an incomplete version of windows, that is.


So ... When you hold ALT(option) on startup, you get the grey Partition choice screen and all you have is Windows to choose from? Macintosh isn't even a choice ?

I think you wiped your whole drive an accident, man! I think you hit enter to format the wrong partition on your hard drive.


Not good at all!

The best you could do to attempt to recover any critical files you will need off of your drive would be to do the following:

Don't try to reinstall windows or reformat as you will cause more changes in the hard drive surface (as in, you will keep on writing over the data that was there "before" that the system can no longer see) ..

Download and run Data Rescue II on another mac if you have a hold of one.

Put the Macbook in Target disk mode... (When powering on, just like holding option, hold T instead) A Firewire logo along with a battery life indicator will show.

Plug one of your firewire cables into the macbook, plug the other end into the mac you have Data Rescue II running on.

In data rescue, the drive of your macbook should pop up in the device list. Click on it and click on a thorough scan. This may take up to 2-5 hours depending on the size of the drive and how many files were in your OS/x and Windows partitions.

It will look for ANY files that still exist that the system can no longer see.

When it is done scanning it will give you a complete list of files successfully recovered organized by the Type of file it is...

So it will show folders like
"Document"(Pages documents, word, excel, etc... )
"JPEG" (Any photos, even BMP files)
"Sounds (Any mp3 files, itunes, etc..)
"Folders" What folders that were completely recovered and still organized, those folders that are NOT organized (not successfully recoverable, the files will be placed in the folders mentioned above arranged by file type... Which is a pain, but its better to have your files back and not in the order they were before than not having them at all, correct?

Try it

 

[noodleculture]

thanks stevey

i will try asap but i don't have another mac any more gotta contact some friends with one. what about after that? how do i reinstall my os?

does anyone know what the store would do or applecare would do?