OS X :: Changing Master Boot Record / Reformat Internal Drive?
Aug 28, 2009
I am looking for a used Mac for my folks, and someone has posted an imac that they have converted to a PC, having change the master boot record. They say I have to take it to the apple store to get it changed back, but couldn't I just start it up in target disk mode, and reformat the internal drive use carbon copy cloner or something like that?
I am looking for a used Mac for my folks, and someone has posted an imac that they have converted to a PC, having change the master boot record. They say I have to take it to the apple store to get it changed back, but couldn't I just start it up in target disk mode, and reformat the internal drive use carbon copy cloner or something like that?
Ok here's the situation. I'm trying to fix my brothers laptop at the moment and reinstall Leopard. He installed ubuntu and it seems to have deleted the Master Boot record. I've managed to get Leopard to install but the mouse clicker doesn't work. I've managed to narrow down the problem to the MBR, the master boot record.
In terminal I've typed in sudo fdisk -u /dev/rdisk0
This has come up with the error "master boot record not found". I'm now trying to find a way to put the Master boot record back.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to do this?
I want to delete a partition and create a new one, but I need to be able to click option in able to do this. For whatever reason, disk utility will not let me edit my external in any way without deleting the whole thing which I do not want to do.
Ok here's the situation. I'm trying to fix my brothers laptop at the moment and reinstall Leopard. He installed ubuntu and it seems to have deleted the Master Boot record. I've managed to get Leopard to install but the mouse clicker doesn't work. I've managed to narrow down the problem to the MBR, the master boot record.
In terminal I've typed in sudo fdisk -u /dev/rdisk0 This has come up with the error "master boot record not found". I'm now trying to find a way to put the Master boot record back.
I am having problems. I want to delete a partition and create a new one, but I need to be able to click option in able to do this. For whatever reason, disk utility will not let me edit my external in any way without deleting the whole thing which I do not want to do.
I've downloaded Lion and the first "complaint" the installation software has is that neither my Mac hard drive nor Time Machine drive uses the GUID partition scheme. The software instructs me to use Disk Utility to select the appropriate format but Disk Utility states that I can't re-size the partition because it uses the Master Boot Record scheme. Further, it tells me that the drive can't be erased because it's the start-up disk.
I have Snow Leopard 10.6.8 installed on my MacBook (Core 2 Duo, 4 GB). The Mac HD has 220GB available.I waited for Lion to be reasonably fault-free and carefully looked at Lion's requirements only to find out too late about this GUID scheme business. I haven't seen anything about this requirement until I tried to install. I have great fear of re-formatting the drive as that always seems to be the beginning of many problems that take months to resolve. Maybe the choices are to forget Lion or get a new drive and format it to GUID before restoring from my Time Machine
I recently bought a macbook pro and am making the transition from a pc to mac. It's all gone well so far, but I'm not sure what to do with my music. I currently have about 200 gb of music on my external hard drive (connected to my pc.) The internal hard drive on my pc does not have space to accomodate the files on my external.
I do not have the "Copy files to iTunes music folder" currently enabled because my internal doesn't have space. (And I like having the original music files in a separate location as I have over 30,000 songs). I don't know how to transfer my external and music to my macbook, since I will have to reformat the drive (which would erase everything on it, therefore I somehow have to make a backup either on my mac or on my pc. but what to do about the iTunes .xml file and iTunes folder on the internal pc drive??).
My G5 2.5 has sprung a leak and is now kaput (no parts, no one can service). What I's like to do is pull the drive with some legacy stuff I need (Quickbooks and years of business stuff) and boot a new mac mini or imac from this drive. I've given up waiting for a new desktop and they are priced out of this word.
I want to change the internal hard drive in my MacBook Pro 15, for a bigger and faster one but i am concerned because i have many softwares licenses (like Logic studio, Pro Tools, Kontakt, few sample libraries like EWSOgold or Motu products) and i wonder if changing the hard drive is going to create trouble with them.
I intend to create an image of my drive in my external hard drive and then exchange it for the new one and copy everything back in. I have tried unsuccessfully to do the image but i'll keep on trying.
I have the latest generation Mac Pro with the stock drive. That's the 300GB WDC drive. It seems a little slow in terms of response time and at times loud. I have been eyeing the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive. I could either replace the stock boot disk with the 7200.11 and use the stock disk as a scratch disk. If so, what it's the best way to move over my boot data from one disk to another? (if possible)
Or I could just use the 7200.11 to store my applications and run them from that disk. Is that as easy to just copy over the Applications to the other drive? PS: I use my Mac Pro for Final Cut for HD (audio/video) editing and Web development (Photoshop, Textmate) and run Windows under Parallels for IE6/7/8 testing.
I have a Mac Pro from 2006, and it has hard drives in all four bays. The first drive is the 250gb default drive from Apple. The rest are Seagate and Samsung. The setup is: 250 (Mac) / 320 (Empty) / 750 (Backup) / 1000 (Media) The 250gb is getting full every once in a while, and I might wish to replace it with another 1000 or even the new seagate 1.5TB one. Whatever .. but since it only has the OS + Program files and some stuff in /home, I want to use the bigger drives for the data. And use the 320gb as the boot drive.
Move (clone) the 250gb to the 320gb Reboot and boot from the 320gb, replacing the 250gb. Which I can then make empty and use until I replace it with a 1000gb drive. I can use CCC to clone the 250gb to the 320gb. But is that enough? How can I then reboot and have the 320gb as if it was the 250gb,. And how can I be certain it is booting from the cloned 320gb, or the original 250gb once I am back into OSX? And can I then repartition the 250gb and still reboot, or will this ruin the master boot record or boot menu setup, etc?
I have no experience with this (yet). And am afraid to end up with a non booting system and a long night of trying to restore using the retail disk for leopard. I hope I am making sense. I just want to move my boot to the 320, and get more space for my boot hd.
Internal hard drive crashed, could not repair. Lion installed on external boot drive, using Forklift to recover files. Cannot access the files of other users from internal drive. How di I change permissions on the internal old boot drive so I can recover the files?
I have owned a Mac Mini for three years now (my friends convinced me to try the Apple way and this is my first Mac). The CD/DVD died just three weeks after warranty expired and Apple said (in essence) 'tough crap...you didn't buy AppleCare'.I have functioned without a CD/DVD drive since then, and everything was fine... until a week or two ago. We installed an update in iTunes, and everything started running S...L...O...W... So, we rebooted the computer! Instead of rebooting, it made the "bong!" sound and then a screen with an apple and a spinning wheel runs indefinitely. We let it run all night the first time and it stays on that screen for as long as you let it.
I started this situation with a bootable hard drive that I removed from a 4,1 (mid 2008) and a brand new unibody MacBook Pro. What I wanted to do was use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the old drive to the new MBP. I used CCC to clone the drive to the new one and repaired permissions on the internal drive and tried booting from it. No Luck. I figured this was stupid to do and I could just use migration assistant so I decided to reinstall Leopard on the unibody. Unfortunately when I attempt to boot from the DVD it doesn't go past a blank grey screen. I also tried holding down option to open the boot manager and select the DVD, when hit enter over the DVD it freezes. The interesting thing is that when I connect the old drive to the unibody using an enclosure I can boot from the external drive no problem. I tried using another computer to install leopard on the unibody over firewire and the installation went fine but when I start the unibody it doesn't go past a blank grey screen. I am also positive the hard drive isn't damaged or anything because when I go to the boot manager after leopard is installed the internal drive shows up but when I select it, it freezes. I have tried resetting the PRAM, NVRAM, repairing the disk (which is successful). When I try to boot into single user mode the computer freezes when loading the text. Another interesting thing is that when do boot from the external drive it goes through verbose mode every time and I never choose to do that. Right now I am attempting to clone drive using Super Duper to new drive and see what happens.
Whenever I restart Tiger, it closes all the directory windows. I thought it should preserve all the window states in Tiger when you restart.
If I resize the directory window in my internal drive, it does not preserve the new window size. But if I resize an external disk directory window, it preserves the new size.
I found out from Get Info that my internal drive is locked with read only permission only, but my external drive is unlocked with read+write permission.
How do I change the permission so the window states can be preserved on my home drive?
Info: iMac, MacBook, PowerBook, iPad, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
Here's a fun problem. After installing Sophos anti-virus and starting a (VERY slow) full scan, a day or two later I found my iMac frozen at the screensaver. It was completely unresponsive so I did a hard reboot, at which point it got as far as starting to boot Lion (apple logo on screen, spinning indicator showing) before stalling indefinitely in that state with the indicator spinning.
I restarted and booted from the recovery partition, launched disk utility, and discovered that the SMART status of the drive was "failing". The machine would still boot from the recovery partition and my boot camp partition, but I assumed that the disk failing was why the OSX partition wouldn't boot (the recovery partition worked, as did the windows 7 bootcamp partition). I replaced the factory-installed internal HDD with another of the same make, model, and capacity (Seagate 1TB), and performed a restore from the Time Machine backup on my Drobo.
The result was the same as the original problem - it wouldn't boot, hung with the indicator spinning. Thinking that the Sophos scan was somehow responsible (in-progress when the last TM backup was made) I tried restoring to a backup a few days older, (to the best of my recall from BEFORE I downloaded Sophos) only to have the same result.
Anyone have any ideas? I made a clean install of Lion (using the recovery partition on my old internal HDD, now connected externally via USB) to an external drive while I was waiting for the replacement hard disk to arrive, and it boots fine from that. I haven't tried a clean install to the internal HDD yet, as I'd obviously prefer to recover my installed apps as they were before, that being the point of a Time Machine backup, right?
I just picked up a Mac Mini today, after I lost all patience with my circa 2007 MacBook Pro when it stopped booting up this morning. I ordered more RAM and am planning to install the recently replaced hard drive from my MBP into my Mac Mini. I'm just wondering, will that drive just show up as another hard drive, similar to the way that external hard drives appear? And more importantly, the old hard drive has an older version of Snow Leopard installed, as well as a bunch of software, including my Adobe CS software. I've already jumped through hoops with Adobe to get my software reinstalled on my MBP a few months ago, and I don't feel like dealing with that again. So if the drive does show up as a separate device, can I just run my Adobe software from that drive? Or do I have to reboot but select that old hard drive at startup (if that's even an option) to run all software on it?
I just got a used mac pro quad. I plan to use it for video production- final cut pro, pics - aperture, and music production- protools. THe computer came with 3 - 10k rpm 160g hd's. Two of them are set up as a raid 0. I like the idea of having a faster drive as a boot drive, but 160 seems kind of small to me as the drive to run memory hungry apps and the operating system. Am I right? I could go to a 300g 10k rpm drive. I am also thinking about getting a bigger drive, say a 750g or 1 tb 7200 rpm. Should I use this as the boot drive or as a secondary storage drive?. If it's the boot drive should I add the other 160g 10k drive to the raid or keep it separate? I assume that neither way would be wrong, nor create a problem, but since I haven't put anything on it yet, I'm wondering what would be the most efficient way to manage my files and get the most out of my computer.
On start up the white screen of death and a flashing file icon with ? is all that happens.
Have reset PRAM and SMC
Boots perfectly from external drive
Internal drive is ok, in fact I have tried two different drives both of which are working perfectly.
Doesn't start in Safe Mode
Starts in Single Use Mode
A1278 Model Identifier: MacBookPro5,5 Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo Processor Speed: 2.26 GHz Number Of Processors: 1 Total Number Of Cores: 2 L2 Cache: 3 MB Memory: 4 GB Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz Boot ROM Version: MBP55.00AC.B03 SMC Version (system): 1.47f2 Serial Number (system): 7303202H66D Hardware UUID: 00F60032-5E52-52B1-8945-D6BC7F175795 Snow Leopard 10.6.8
I have a 1.8 duel G5, 3 gig of ram, and 2 internal hard drives, a 120 gig and an 80 gig. My question: does anyone know if it makes a difference (performance wise) which drive I boot from? The 80 was the original boot drive, but due to space problems, now I boot from the 120. I've run every diagnistic imaginable, including Diskwarrior. I have the identical machine at work, and that one just seems snappier. I maintain both machines the same, cocktail, MacJanitor etc. There is plenty of room on both drives. So the last thing I can think of is the master/slave thing.
I am considering purchasing diskwarrior but want to make sure it can help my situation before I purchase it. My imac will not boot from the internal hard drive (Intel processor) When I use disk utility to try and repair the disk, I get error messages and it won't repair. I can see the HD but cannot repair it. When I connect using target mode with my mac book pro, the hard drive does not appear on my host (macbook pro) computer. I have reloaded OS X (Leopard) onto a firewire external drive and can boot my imac that way but I can not find my original internal Macintosh HD. Will disk warrior be able to help with this scenario. I would really like to access that internal Macintosh HD and retrieve my files.
The iMac forum is clogged with news of the new iMac, so I decided to post my problem here: I just bought a friends old iBook G3 for writing and surfing the web. It's slow and full of his junk. He doesn't have the original disks, so I was wondering, would the install disks from my Intel iMac work on it?
I've been trying to install xp pro sp2 using boot camp on a macbook 2.2Ghz. It does the initial setup where i reformat the xp partition in fat32 and then when it goes to boot into the xp installer it says: Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: <windows root>system32hal.dll. please re-install a copy of the above file.
I've been having some problems lately and I assumed it may be related to my HD since it's been making a lot of creaking noises for a while. Its been freezing a lot and when I click on folders they won't open and the text underneath starts flashing. Yikes. I've never come across that one before so I started booting up off the slave drive. Well just now the same thing happened with the text flashing running off the slave. Could this somehow be related to the master drive failing or do I just have other bigger issues?
i have a big problem with my MBP 13". I install Mac os x (try also Maveriks) on a HDD drive it works fine, but when i put this HDD inside (internal) it won't boot.
I want to keep my applications etc on one internal HD and use my second internal HD as a back up.I am a graphic designer, and i have been backing up to an external LACIE Porche 160 Gig firewire HD. This has worked fine, but...My second internal HD (112 gig?) is still loaded with 10.3 and has adobe CS2 on it along with some other crap that I no longer need.I have loaded Adobe CS3 on my primary drive and have all the files I need on that one...What is the best way to set up my second HD as a "slave" drive to improve the performance of my G5 dual 2 Ghz??Will there be any issues now that I loaded Leopard on the primary HD?
Information: Power PC G5 Tower 2 Ghz dual processor (2004?) with two internal hard drives Mac OS X (10.5)
How do I transfer all data from my old internal hard drive to a new internal hard drive? I have an iMac with a 320gb internal HD that is full and I am replacing it with a 2tb internal drive. I have several external drives; 1 tb, 2tb and 3 tb. The 2 tb is being used for Time Machine. Do I have to buy an enclosure? If so, where would I get an inexpensive one? I also want to partition the new internal drive for Windows, and I'm not sure how much space to use for that. I plan to use Windows to check my work in PowerPoint created on my Mac for clients on PCs.