So my friend decided to attempt to install XP on his iMac via Boot Camp in Leopard. Somehow (and I really don't know how) he's managed to completely bugger up the process and lose his OS X partition completely. Now, whilst it would be all well and good booting to the install disc and formatting the drive in disk utility, this is not an option. Literally. When I run disk utility on the drive all I get is that it's an unknown format and I cannot repair it, verify it, erase it, nothing. Can't do a thing. Soooo... I need to format the drive to HFS and then do a proper install of OS X again. The only way I could see to do this would be to use something like the fdisk or fsck commands in the Terminal. Unfortunately, I know squat about Unix and such so any basic assistance in layman's terms would be most helpful. Mostly with things like proper syntax and such. I can grasp which command does what, but trial and error in finding how to input them in the right way is not much fun. Thanks again for any help!
Instead of messing around with the command line, couldn't you plug your Mac into his via firewire, using your Mac as a boot drive for the dead one? I know that there's a way of putting a mac into firwire disk mode, as this is how you can transfer all your data when you upgrade... Give it a go - boot your mac into firewire disk mode (hold T on start up), boot his from an external disk (hold option key on start up), once connected to yours via FW. Then once it's booted from your Mac, trash the drive on his using disk util.
I was actually going to do this, but I don't have a firewire cable (shocking, I know - forgot to borrow one from work too) and another thing is that if I can't format the drive from within the Leopard disc's Disk Utility app, why would I be able to from my own install of OS X? Would it really make a difference? Thanks for your help matey. Regarding the command line troubles: http://www.ss64.com/osx/fdisk.html ??? Yes, I want to do that. But I don't know how. Hah.
All sorted now. I figured out how to run fdisk properly. fdisk -a boothfs /dev/disk0 ... fun times. So after that the device was recognisable and I could finally get disk utility to erase the disk and do a fresh install. Now his machine won't see any wireless networks though, gah. I remember another friend of mine had this problem with his TiBook and a clean Leopard install.
Good to know you've sorted it out, but you can use a tiger dvd to format the drive - apparently there's been quite a few issues with Leopard's disk utility... /Fr4nk
Yeah? I genuinely didn't think to try that. Should have given it a go. I did have a go with the Disk Utility on my Mac via Target Disk Mode but to no use. Again, that's a Leopard install too.
