In serious need of help

Hello,

I am new to mac and was trying to get windows on my imac via bootcamp hard drive partition. However I made an error and no longer have the lion partition and can only get on windows. I have a copy of windows and I think I have a functioning copy of lion both on DVD. I have tried to reboot through the lion cd by holding option or 'c' when restarting however instead of loading from the disk it just goes to a black command screen with an underscore blinking in the top left corner and remains there. Can anyone help me fix my issue and help me partition correctly??

Also is there any way my installation disk of lion is set up correctly? It took me a while to get the windows one burned correctly so I am not convinced this one is set up properly yet. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Hmmmm. Do you have any files you want to keep on Windows? The only thing I know to do would be to erase the hard drive and then reinstall Lion onto the hard drive. Then you can try to reinstall windows.

Good luck!

okay how do i do that?

Here is a link that may help. OS X Lion: About Lion Recovery


If you have a CD with a copy of Lion on it, put it in and hold "c" right after you press the power button to turn it on. You should be brought to an installation screen. There you go to the menu bar and select Utilities then select Disk Utility. Select your hard drive and choose the erase option. This will completely erase your hard drive. Now format the drive to Mac OS X Journaled (Extended). Then continue with the installation.

You can google Mac OS X Lion restore and you may be able to find a few step by step tutorials.

Best of luck!

When holding Option, did OSX show up in the boot menu? Does Windows boot to a desktop?

Try resetting the PRAM - Press the "Command," "Option," "P" and "R" keys on the keyboard simultaneously, and hold them down right after pressing the power button. Wait until it restarts with the chime and then release the keys.

See: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2600

Thank you very much the link was very useful!! I was able to erase the windows partition and then use that to load os x. For some reason it would not allow me to reboot onto the old os x partition. For reference the option or 'c' button did not work when holding upon reboot but command + r from the link did.

Now any advice on partitioning so i can actually have the windows and mac partition as i intended?? I am fearful I am gunna lose all the files I had on the old mac partition but have the important stuff backed up on my laptop so it is mostly just a big annoyance. Any ideas where I went wrong the first time? Again any advice or tips would greatly appreaciated.

Thanks

Have a look at this http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/boot_camp_install-setup.pdf.

Cheers

Awesome thank you very much. This looks like it will be very useful! It seems to only mention windows xp and vista. Am I to assumer it should work the same way with windows 7?

Also now I am just trying got get rid of the other partition and make it all into the one partition I have working. I tried doing it via bootcamp but it won't let me unpartition it because it is not longer a bootcamp windows partition. Any advice on merging my partitions?

Thanks

I don't think you have mentioned Disk Utility so have a go at this.

Launch Disk Utility and choose the upper icon for the drive in the sidebar (the one with the name of the drive itself, not any of the volumes. Go to erase tab. Format Mac Os Extended (Journaled) It has replaced HSF+.

Click on erase.

HTH

Cheers

Thanks for the advice I managed to delete the partition I did not want by clicking on the overall hard drive in disk utility then selecting the partition I wanted to delete and clicking the minus button in the lower left hand corner. Next I am trying to now make the one partition I have into the only partition and utilize all off the hard drive space as it is only half of it now. Any pointers>??

Thanks

Format the drive. Alas this is a nice old mess. You should have deleted the partition via Bootcamp Assistant which you could not access. Use Lion Recovery if you can get to the 'net, format drive Mac OS Extended and make sure GUID is selected under partition. This is one major reason folk should burn Lion to a USB thumb drive prior to running the installer. If you have discs from say Snow Leopard, use that to boot from.

Thanks for all the help now I am back to trying to run bootcamp again to partition the drive. I believe I am to the point where I made my error in the first place. I am trying to select the bootcamp partition created when going through the installation wizard and it will not let me because it says it is not formatted to NTFS. I dont want to make the same error twice so does anybody have advice on this??

Thanks