Stuck fixing a Mac... help!

[DocGreen]

Customer came to me with an inherited computer that won't boot. It's an iMac, but she says it has Windows 7 installed. I watched her try to boot it, and it came up with a Windows Boot Manager error (0x000000f). I figured, eh, no problem... I'll take it back to the shop, boot up a PE disc, punch in some commands and be good to go.

Not so much.

First off, I couldn't for the life of me get this iMac to boot to anything. Probably because I don't know the first thing about Macs. Anyway, I ended up pulling the HDD and putting it in my test PC. Booted up Parted Magic to test the drive's health, and found out it's toast. No biggie, right? Just replace the HDD.

Then I pulled up gparted and found out that this is actually a dual-boot. Damn.

So... assuming the drive is toast and I'd have to re-install both OSes... do I even want to mess with this? Where do I even start??

 

[coffee]

Customer came to me with an inherited computer that won't boot. It's an iMac, but she says it has Windows 7 installed. I watched her try to boot it, and it came up with a Windows Boot Manager error (0x000000f). I figured, eh, no problem... I'll take it back to the shop, boot up a PE disc, punch in some commands and be good to go.

Not so much.

First off, I couldn't for the life of me get this iMac to boot to anything. Probably because I don't know the first thing about Macs. Anyway, I ended up pulling the HDD and putting it in my test PC. Booted up Parted Magic to test the drive's health, and found out it's toast. No biggie, right? Just replace the HDD.

Then I pulled up gparted and found out that this is actually a dual-boot. Damn.

So... assuming the drive is toast and I'd have to re-install both OSes... do I even want to mess with this? Where do I even start??

Just wanted to say that I feel your pain.

Since you can check the partitions can you mount the windows partition and grab the clients stuff?

I hardly ever work on apple stuff. Im sorry.

 

[Markverhyden]

Sounds like they may have set it up with Boot Camp. Unless a user has a specific requirement to have direct access to the underlying hardware layer I never recommend Boot Camp. In fact I've never set anyone up with Boot Camp. FYI, you can load W7 all by itself but you have to download the driver pack for that machine. And that requires loading OS X to begin with on the target machine to download the driver pack for that particular machine. I suppose you might be able to manually find the drivers but I recommend using the VM option I mention below.

You should find out why they are using Boot Camp. Unless it is for a special USB device such as an intra-oral camera then you should recommend they use a VM solution like Parallels or VMware Fusion for the M$ side. Those VM client apps are low cost, under $100.

Install the new HD, install OS X. Then install the VM client and build the W7 VM. The issue is how to do the OS X. Newer machines manufactured with OS X 10.7 or higher should have the Recovery mode option in firmware. So, after installing the HD, power it up into Recovery mode by holding down the Command key + R key. Then you can use Disk Utilities to partition the HD and do a Internet install of OS X. If the machine is prior to that you need to have a OS X image to boot from. Even if they had upgraded to 10.7 or later the Recovery mode boot option is stored on the old HD so it's gone. Let me know if you need help getting a OS X image.

Data recovery is a separate task. You can use something like R-Tools to grab those files from both partitions. Under no circumstances initialize the old HD.

 

[DocGreen]

Well, I'm running Clonezilla now just in case. I'm sure if I tried I could probably recover SOME data at least.

 

[DocGreen]

Sounds like they may have set it up with Boot Camp. Unless a user has a specific requirement to have direct access to the underlying hardware layer I never recommend Boot Camp. In fact I've never set anyone up with Boot Camp. FYI, you can load W7 all by itself but you have to download the driver pack for that machine. And that requires loading OS X to begin with on the target machine to download the driver pack for that particular machine. I suppose you might be able to manually find the drivers but I recommend using the VM option I mention below.

You should find out why they are using Boot Camp. Unless it is for a special USB device such as an intra-oral camera then you should recommend they use a VM solution like Parallels or VMware Fusion for the M$ side. Those VM client apps are low cost, under $100.

Install the new HD, install OS X. Then install the VM client and build the W7 VM. The issue is how to do the OS X. Newer machines manufactured with OS X 10.7 or higher should have the Recovery mode option in firmware. So, after installing the HD, power it up into Recovery mode by holding down the Command key + R key. If the machine is prior to that you need to have a OS X image to boot from. Even if they had upgraded to 10.7 or later the Recovery mode boot option is stored on the old HD so it's gone. Let me know if you need help getting a OS X image.

Data recovery is a separate task. You can use something like R-Tools to grab those files from both partitions. Under no circumstances initialize the old HD.

I'll have to contact the client and see what she wants end-game. The Mac was inherited as-is, so whoever it was that setup the dual-boot in the first place is long gone. The client is a photographer, so she may actually want to use it as a Mac. She said her kids had been using it up until it died. Not sure if there's even any data that she'd want recovered.

 

[Markverhyden]

I'll have to contact the client and see what she wants end-game. The Mac was inherited as-is, so whoever it was that setup the dual-boot in the first place is long gone. The client is a photographer, so she may actually want to use it as a Mac. She said her kids had been using it up until it died. Not sure if there's even any data that she'd want recovered.

Based on your response I'm sure the VM option will meet their requirements. You can recover everything off the old HD, ignoring bad block stuff, file system corruption, and Windoze apps, using a DR app.

 

[pcpete]

Inherited, they may just be happy with a clean booting Mac without Windows. I would just talk to them. Without a copy of Windows 7 and licence(that may just be a bad assumption) not much you can do..