Paging MacTech and any other OS X gurus…
My old (2006-vintage) iMac seems to be bricked. Rather than digging up a suitably old copy of Parallels to run Windows XP on this Mac, I decided to use the Boot Camp Assistant. The Windows install seemed to be going well until I put in an incorrect product key, and the install aborted. So much for re-purposing the old Mac to use as a Windows box…
Now, it’s caught in some sort of temporal causality loop. When I turn it on, there’s no startup chime, no happy mac, no sad mac, no apple logo. Just a gray screen. The only thing I can get it to do now is boot from a Windows installer disc, and the process grinds along until it decides it’s had enough and hangs somewhere in the unpacking files process.
Time for some deep-level rescue work, I think. Would I be able to extract the drive from the Mac, plug it into an external enclosure on another Mac, then use Disk Utility to kil the would-be Windows partition and make the drive bootable again? Or, ignore the Windows partition and bless the drive? Or do I need to just pull off the files I want to keep, then nuke and pave? All of these are a pain, since it is an iMac, and getting at the drive is quite a task.
Have you tried safe mode booting or single user mode or any of the special start up key combos? Just wondering what you’ve ready tried.
Try booting with the option key held down.
This should let you select a bootable partition.
No boot options work. It just soldiers on and tries to unsuccessfully install Windows if the CD is in the drive. If there’s no Windows CD, it dies with a DOS style black screen and “No bootable device – insert boot disk and press any key”
Speaking of the optical drive - the only way I was able to get the Windows disc out was to wedge the disc via the loading slot, and after 10-15 seconds, the drive gave up and ejected the disc. I miss the days of being able to use a paper clip, and holding the mouse button on startup does not eject it. Putting in an OS X disc and rebooting gives the same “No bootable device” error.
Do you have another machine that you can use to run Disk Warrior on the dead iMac, using FireWire target mode?
Hmm…stupid question, and probably won’t help anyway, but is this a wireless keyboard or a wired one? I’ve often had issues with wireless keyboards (and I use the Apple ones) recognize startup key combos on booting and have to plug in a wired USB keyboard to get it to work.
It’s a wired Apple keyboard, and just to be sure I didn’t have a dead Option key, I tried another Apple keyboard.
I found a huge (61 pages) thread about this at the Apple support forum, and it appears to be a kink relatively common to the early Intel iMacs. The short version: the drive is trashed. If I’m lucky, I can put it in an external enclosure to rescue files, but the boot table may be hopelessly munged. Drives are cheap now, so it’s cost-effective to dump the drive than to try and rebuild the MBR. Boo.