So I'm a windows/linux guy, been building pcs for years. My old neighbor (lives an hour away now)asks me to help him with an issue he is having on his macbook pro. It is running 10.8.4 from early 2011.
He says he needs to add windows 7 to his computer as a dual boot for certain programs. I think that sounds easy enough and tell him to come over and I'll get to it this weekend. So he leaves the computer with me and within a few hours I'm frustrated. Bootcamp is becoming the most infuriating thing, and nothing I do seems to work. He has no disk-drive, he replaced it with a ssd which contains the mac os x. The old laptop hd seemed to have been partitioned for use with an emulation type program but he says to just remove it.
So because he removed his disk drive bootcamp gives me a hard time. I try a tweak I find online to convince bootcamp that his computer has never had a disk drive and to try and build a boot disk from usb. Everything is looking great until it finally restarts and tells me it can't find a boot disk. Whatever. So I start googling and tweaking. Try removing usb devices, holding option at startup just small stuff. So finally I get this genius thought...Maybe it won't find the drive because the 500gb hd is partitioned so it's trying to look for something to boot from there.
So I go into disk utility and delete the bootcamp partition under the 500gb drive. Big mistake. The computer restarts, and when it's back the macintosh hd is gone. I've checked the settings and it should be showing on desktop but it is not. The paths to the library folders like "downloads" appear to have been broken. The applications still work but I can't return the computer like this. I don't even know where to begin on this fix.
Googling this new problem just gives me a bunch of people who lost the shortcut, but that isn't what is going on. Sorry for this big wall of text. I'm stressed out and I assured this guy I could handle it, but it appears I was in way over my head. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have the computer all weekend.
He says he needs to add windows 7 to his computer as a dual boot for certain programs. I think that sounds easy enough and tell him to come over and I'll get to it this weekend. So he leaves the computer with me and within a few hours I'm frustrated. Bootcamp is becoming the most infuriating thing, and nothing I do seems to work. He has no disk-drive, he replaced it with a ssd which contains the mac os x. The old laptop hd seemed to have been partitioned for use with an emulation type program but he says to just remove it.
So because he removed his disk drive bootcamp gives me a hard time. I try a tweak I find online to convince bootcamp that his computer has never had a disk drive and to try and build a boot disk from usb. Everything is looking great until it finally restarts and tells me it can't find a boot disk. Whatever. So I start googling and tweaking. Try removing usb devices, holding option at startup just small stuff. So finally I get this genius thought...Maybe it won't find the drive because the 500gb hd is partitioned so it's trying to look for something to boot from there.
So I go into disk utility and delete the bootcamp partition under the 500gb drive. Big mistake. The computer restarts, and when it's back the macintosh hd is gone. I've checked the settings and it should be showing on desktop but it is not. The paths to the library folders like "downloads" appear to have been broken. The applications still work but I can't return the computer like this. I don't even know where to begin on this fix.
Googling this new problem just gives me a bunch of people who lost the shortcut, but that isn't what is going on. Sorry for this big wall of text. I'm stressed out and I assured this guy I could handle it, but it appears I was in way over my head. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have the computer all weekend.
