10-11-2006, 03:25 PM

well its stuck in a neverending white screen of death. Maybe I should start this story from the beginning.

I had bootcamp and windows xp running fine, but I wanted to try vista, so I went and got a copy from microsofts site and went to set it up. I previously had xp on a fat formatted partition so when i tried to install vista over that i got an error, so I assumed it was the formatting and i delted the partition and created a new partition formatted in ntfs. So i try again to install vista. This time it says it cant because it requires some drivers or somethingnot quite sure, point is I delete one of the partions from there (i cant rember what my reasoning for this was at the time) but i still had the mac partition that im sure of(because it was the big partition so i didnt touch it). Anyways vista still wouldnt install so I decide to just install the windows xp back in but I acidentally put an older version of xp that doesnt have sp2. Something or other happened and now my imac starts up with the little start up music but it stays on a white screen. Its the bluetooth keyboard and mouse version btw. I called tech support and ive tried a million start up commands the only ones that work are pushing the mouse button to eject cd and the one that resets the pram or something and holding option makes the mouse cursor appear but nothing else. There is a tech thats suppose to come one of these days but i would like to fix it myself if possible. Is there any way or am I screwed?

10-11-2006, 03:43 PM

Can you boot to disc by holding down C? If you can then it sounds like you need to reformat. Boot Camp is still a beta and doesn't even officially support Vista's RC's.

10-11-2006, 03:58 PM

It sounds like somewhere along the way you managed to delete the efi boot manager...

Try trpnmonkey's suggestion, if that doesn't work you're up a creek without a paddle I'm afraid.

If you really want to mess around with this stuff, it's always advisable to keep a bootable backup harddrive around so you have something to fall back on. Although in this case it's not clear if that would work.

10-11-2006, 04:00 PM

I tried holding c like a million times i guess im just gonna have to wait for the repair man.

10-11-2006, 04:23 PM

Well, if you have another intel mac, you could connect the 2 with a firewire cable, and boot the imac by holding down 't'.

That'll let you access the iMacs drive from the other mac and you can reinstall OS X from there.

10-11-2006, 05:36 PM

Originally Posted by Aptmunich

Well, if you have another intel mac, you could connect the 2 with a firewire cable, and boot the imac by holding down 't'.

That'll let you access the iMacs drive from the other mac and you can reinstall OS X from there.

thats something i haven't tried but dam I only know one person who has an intel mac and I don't have a firewire cable but i can get a hold of a none intel mac do you think that would work?

10-11-2006, 05:45 PM

Because you are trying to load and mac OS X (Intel), you will need an mac Intel box.

10-11-2006, 05:46 PM

Originally Posted by dtownsu0000

thats something i haven't tried but dam I only know one person who has an intel mac and I don't have a firewire cable but i can get a hold of a none intel mac do you think that would work?

I looked around and found two articles about FireWire Target Disc Mode:


http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58583

http://eshop.macsales.com/Reviews/Fr.../dualboot.html

10-12-2006, 12:20 AM

i guess ill try to get a hold of another mac otherwise ill suggest it to the repair man whenever they show up, but does anyone know any command that would let me reformat and reinstall?

10-12-2006, 01:02 AM

Originally Posted by dtownsu0000

i guess ill try to get a hold of another mac otherwise ill suggest it to the repair man whenever they show up, but does anyone know any command that would let me reformat and reinstall?

Since you are unable to Boot by CD by holding down C it looks like your boot loader was deleted as Aptmunich said. Without the bootloader you can't do anything on your machine.

10-12-2006, 05:14 PM

Since you are unable to Boot by CD by holding down C it looks like your boot loader was deleted as Aptmunich said. Without the bootloader you can't do anything on your machine.

That is really worrying, can this be fixed and is it covered by Apple Care? I also presume that support for bootcamp isnt too good..

10-12-2006, 05:20 PM

It should be normally covered by AppleCare but I am not sure what happens since Apple is not responsible for anything that happens with Boot Camp since it is a beta. They do not provide support for Boot Camp in general

10-13-2006, 04:42 PM

actually apple is replacing my logic board and hardrive, but there on back order so I still have to keep waiting unfortunately. It made me feel like telling them just send someone over with an intel mac and a firewire cable, but whatever. Apple's customer service is pretty good though so I'm glad i got that warranty.

10-14-2006, 04:59 PM

Is it possible to do the target disk mode with a usb cable?

10-14-2006, 05:09 PM

No, you need a firewire but if they are replacing your logic board target disk mode would not help anyway.