unable to format harddrive

Hi guys,
I could really use some help.
This week I installed a program on my win7 bootcamp on a 2010/2011 (?) MacBook and after that I couldn't reboot to os x again. It tried to boot into safe mode, but shut itself out after that.
Disk utility in recovery mode tells me that I need to reformat my drive (after backing up my files, which were still accesible through windows). I tried to do that but it gave me the error that 'the drive could not be opened'.
When I tried a clean install trhough recovery mode, the mac drive did not show up.

I got no clue what is going on, but before I format the windows partition in the hopes of a NTFS/Mac combi problem, I was hoping if somebody recognizes this problem or has another idea.

Cheers,

What hard drive do you have inside. IDE or SSD? Do you still have the installation DVD for the MacBook or are you using the system Disk Utility?

What did you install to Windows? It may have messed with what it called the Boot sector, which could have destroyed the boot information for OS X.

Disk utility in recovery mode tells me that I need to reformat my drive (after backing up my files, which were still accesible through windows). I tried to do that but it gave me the error that 'the drive could not be opened'.

Click to expand...

That's the first clue you're dealing with a flaky hard drive that's on its way to complete failure. Very likely the installation of the Windows 7 program was coincidental. Make sure you have backups of your OS X and Windows 7 installations.

Hi guys,
Thanks for the answers, much appriciated!

The disk is a 5 year old IDE, so you could be very right that it is showing signs of age. I have no boot disk here, only the recovery partition.

MacInWin said:

What did you install to Windows? It may have messed with what it called the Boot sector, which could have destroyed the boot information for OS X.

Click to expand...

I was installing Revit Architecture. It shouldn't really destroy the boot information for OS X, but I think the same as you. Question is, how can I get my drive to format?
Only thing I can think of is formatting the bootcamp partition (40gb) and instal a clean OS X on that and from there on hope to get my old partition back with it, but not sure if that would help me any further.

Cheers

Well, you can boot from the internet and do a full repartition/reformat of the drive, wiping out both the BootCamp and OS X partitions and start all over. See this Apple article. But I'm with chscag that if DU says the drive needs to be reformatted, it's probably getting ready to fail and should be replaced. If you do that, then you can use the same internet recovery to reinstall the version of OS X that came with the machine originally and then from here update to whatever version you want. Once that is done, you can recover your OS X files from your backups (you DO have them, right?) and do a reinstall of BootCamp/Windows and recover those files from their backups (right?).

MacInWin said:

Well, you can boot from the internet and do a full repartition/reformat of the drive, wiping out both the BootCamp and OS X partitions and start all over.

Click to expand...

Well that is exactly the point. It doesn't allow me to do a full reformat of the OS X partition. When I try to, I get the error that 'the drive cannot be opened'.
Is there another (guaranteed) way to format my drive? While keeping the Recovery partition intact so I can do a clean install from there.

duketv said:

Well that is exactly the point. It doesn't allow me to do a full reformat of the OS X partition. When I try to, I get the error that 'the drive cannot be opened'.
Is there another (guaranteed) way to format my drive? While keeping the Recovery partition intact so I can do a clean install from there.

Click to expand...

I hate to tell you this but your drive has very likely failed. Trying to reformat that drive would be pointless and involve a lot of work which will have to be repeated when it does the same thing. Time to replace it and restore from backup.

About all you can do is to do a repartition/reformat of the ENTIRE drive, not just the OS X partition, if you can do that. That will kill your BootCamp partition as well as the OS X partition. Chscag may be right about the HD failing, but if you can boot Windows and Recovery, it's more likely that the partition table is screwed up and it cannot format just the OS X partition because it can't find it. That CAN be a hardware issue, but it can also be a software screwup. If you try to format the entire drive and still get the error, then the drive is most likely dead or dying.

Hi guys,
sorry for the late reply I tried to fix the partition tables and failed miserably at that so my computer wasn't responsive at all for a few days. In the end I got hold of boot disk and formatted the whole drive and did a clean install, so I am writing this post from a crisp yosemite based macbook.
So far I did not had any issues with the drive so I hope it was just a software problem but I will keep on eye on it and my data backed up for possible future breakdowns.
Thanks again for your much appriciated responses.

Cheers

ps. Is there a solve button for this thread? I can't find it, but want to mark it as such.

Nope. It just sits as it is.