Well, I got a three thousand dollar paper weight.

[sycho]

I have a job as a student lab adviser at my college. This means for two nights a week I am in the build that no-one goes to at night, sitting in a lab, just in case a student comes in with a question or something like that. Well tonight I figured I would pass the time by making my new 2 week old MacBook Pro dual boot OS X and ubuntu Linux. I followed the guide here, http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=198453 , and most of it seemed to work, but it just didn't feel right while installing ubuntu. Then I new it was fubar'ed when I was typed in the commands like the guide said and it was pretty much error after error when I was in the Terminal.

So I restart the MacBook, hoping that even though I wouldn't have ubuntu, I would at least have OS X. Well, it goes "Daaaahhhhhh" and then shows me this nice lovely grey screen. Thats it, no rEFIt menu no nothing. At this point I was very very pissed off, mainly because I have several hours left in my shift and no OS X install disc in sight. I most likely won't have time to reinstall OS X for a couple days, and then I will have to re-rip all my music and try to remember what I had installed. Thankfully I didn't have much important things on the notebook, oh wait, several hundred photos I don't have anywhere else that I seriously just remember about.

So, anyone know of anything I could do right now? Single user mode didn't work, but booting off of the ubuntu disc does, not sure what else I could try.

 

[sycho]

ok, i just turned it on and left if for a while, the rEFIt menu comes ups after what seems like an eternity... I'm really confused now
I will use my school's massive bandwidth to upload my photos somewhere right now.

 

[baxterbrittle]

Well you can probably perform an archive and install for OS X to get the MBP back up and running without having to lose all your data and should fix your booting issues.

 

[sycho]

well, all should be well soon, it boots, but takes forever to get to the boot loader...

I found what seems like a better guide, I already have the partitioning done so it should be no problem

 

[sycho]

So, i used diskutility to repair disk permissions and everything seems good now, trying a much easier guide now.

 

[iBorg20181]

<snip>
Thankfully I didn't have much important things on the notebook, oh wait, several hundred photos I don't have anywhere else that I seriously just remember about.
<snip>

Sounds like you've found a way to retrieve these - thankfully!

My photos are my most "irreplaceable" items on my computer - I always copy my camera SD cards to CD/DVD after loading into iPhoto, before erasing the cards. Always have a backup! Having your only copy on your harddrive is only one crash away from disaster.....

iBorg