[X4U] Very weird disk corruption - pleas for help!

[Jim Robertson]

On 3/25/08 10:42 PM, "Christopher Collins" <maclist at analogdigital.com.au>
wrote:

> I would try booting off one of the install disks and going into Disk
> utility and see if it sees your internal disk drive.
> 
> Try deleting ALL your partitions and then creating a total disk HFS+
> partition to install Leopard onto.
> 
> Then when you have reinstalled Leopard, you should be able to go  through
> the necessary steps to reinstall Boot Camp and XP.

Sometimes what one needs is...

A GENIUS!!!

I went to the Apple Store this evening. The genius said he hadn't a clue why
my series of moves had created this quagmire, but he said he could fix it.

He booted to a portable FW hard drive that had images of almost all recent
Apple System Software Install DVDs (Tiger, Leopard, Servers, etc.) and just
ran the installer on my Tiger installation. That went MUCH faster than it
would have from the Install DVD if I'd even been able to boot from it.

Then, he put a USB dongle into the USB port that somehow directed Software
Update to a server in the back room of the Apple Store and applied all the
updates, in a period of about 20 minutes.

So, I'm not forced to buy a new MacBook Pro, and my son must wait some time
to get his own Intel Mac notebook.

The most impressive bit in all this was how speedy the portable FW drive
was. Anyone have favorites among them? At the Apple Store they're about
$1/Gigabyte, maxing out at 200 GB, unless one buys a desktop device. Seems
to me a great way to take emergency installers and recovery drives along
with one's laptop.

The $64 question is, how long will it take me to muster the courage to try
booting my rescued MacBook Pro from my Leopard Install DVD?

Jim Robertson
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