As in title.

I tried to partition my harddrive with bootcamp, went pretty well. Used rEFIt on my mac to switch between the systems once I got them working.

Tried to install Backtrack 5 R3 with a LiveCD, went mostly smooth except an error in the end claiming that Grub 2 could not be installed or something like that.

After the restart I can't boot into either Backtrack or OSX. I plop in the OSX install cd and try to see if I can save something. The patitions cannot be formatted. I mess around a bit with the disk utility tool and with restarting with both the OSX DVD and the Backtrack LIVECD. I then notice that my harddrive (The main partition that was there when I got my mac), has been replaced with some other one named disk01 or something. I made sure that I DID NOT format my main drive.

I have been searching everywhere on the internet, but can't seem to find a solution. Nothing works. (Tried all the safe boot bullshit, Don't know shit about Linux AT ALL.) Basically I've given up on getting my old mac back, and am now focusing on saving my School data if possible (2½ years of IMPORTANT NOTES i need for my finals)

My only possible idea left, is taking out the hard drive and putting it into my desktop to see if I can salvage any data. If not I'm just going to do a fresh reinstall of OSX and cry myself to sleep.


Is there anything you can help me do? If someone can make me get it as it used to be, I will be willing to pay you some over paypal.


I know I'm an idiot for not taking backups, but please help me.

Sincerely

an idiot.


By the way, running snow leopard.

Please don't tell us that you need immediate help, if your data were important you would have made backups.

Could you please boot a Linux Live-CD, open a terminal and post the output of Markus

1 members found this post helpful.

I actually had most of them backed up, but they were lost when my roommate formatted our hard drive and forgot to tell me.



I booted with a mint livecd, "fdisk -1" is not a valid command it says.

You can try Testdisk to mount your MacOS partition, if that doesn't work out Photorec may be able to recover your data.
But in the first place please post the information markush has asked for and do not unless you know exactly what you are doing.

Offtopic sidenote:If you are new to Linux Backtrack is not the right distro for you, or as the Backtrack developers say it:

1 members found this post helpful.

that should be a lower case L, not the number one.

If I do "fdisk -l" (small L) then is shows this, I hope this was what you were looking for.

When I look up the hard drive in cinnamon, there's a HDD called "500GB Hard Disk DISK0S3" and one called "File System". The DISK0S3 one is empty while the other one has some linux related stuff in I think.

Well that one is HFS* formatted so you should be able to try and open it:

I was able to recover most of my documents with Photorec by putting my mac's HDD inside my desktop. Thanks everyone!

Since there is only one HFS partition on the disk, I doubt that it had been really partitioned or formatted, probably you've only damaged the bootloader.

Markus

Would there be any way to fix the bootloader?

Yes, probably with the install-CD of the MAC. But I'm not familiar with MAC.

Explanation: The bootloader is installed into a special segment at the "start" of the harddisk, called bootsector. There it is called from the BIOS when the system starts. The typical Linux bootloader, mostly grub, can when called from the BIOS start several operatingsystems (from which you one select at boottime). I guess (but without any warranty) that your unlucky Backtrackinstallation only has tried to install the bootloader, which means that only the so called bootsector (MBR=MasterBootRecord) has been overwritten.

When one boots a Windows-install-CD one has the option (in rescue mode) to "repair the bootsector", you should use google and find out if there is a similar option for your mac-install-CD.

Note: You cannot damage your data as long as you only alter the MBR or the partitiontable. BUT the partitiontable is most important! do yourself a favor and make a printed copy of it!!!

Markus

It is a Mac. IIRC it uses GPT and EFI instead of the old MBR. But I am also not familiar with that, may be the install-CD has a repair option, maybe not.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for all the help so far,

I'm currently still trying to save all my documents with testdisk, but I know for a fact that the snow leopard OSX dvd does not contain a boot repair option when OSX is not installed. Only Mountain lion has it as a feature currently.

I figured I would try to burn GParted & rEFInd onto 2 cd's, and then try and see if I could get my laptop somewhere with those, but as I'm currently using my DVD drive sata cable to connect the laptop hard drive, I can't burn anything right now.

I also want to try what I learnt from these two links and see if I can't get to resolve my problem that way.

http://hints.macworld.com/article.ph...91111185717745

https://discussions.apple.com/thread...art=0&tstart=0

EDIT:

Am also currently scanning with the program "Active partition recovery for windows", about half-way through the scan, this is what it found so far (whatever all those small partitions mean, I have no clue)

http://i.imgur.com/Sk7X3.jpg


Also does somebody know why the new hard drive doesn't show up in Windows Explorer? When I plugged it in, it was successfully found by Windows, and the drivers were installed without any problems. However there's still no way to access it as my other HDD.

yes the lower case L at the end of fdisk tells fdisk to list all of the drives and their partitions along with the type of format on the partitions.

are you sure that it is useful to fiddle with Windows tools on a Mac?

I don't know how about Mac, but Windows cannot read Linux-filesystems by default.

Markus