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20031205 Friday December 05, 2003

Is my PowerBook hosed? OK, it might a bit of a foolish experiment, but it sounded easy enough on my way back from lunch. I figured since I could use my PowerBook as a Firewire Drive on my other PowerBook, doing the same on Windows XP should be a breeze. It seems that's not the case. I "initialized" the disk on Windows XP and it didn't show up as a drive letter - so I tried to back out. Now my PowerBook won't boot. I tried resetting the PRAM, running Disk Utility from the Panther CD, and even running DiskWarrior from my iPod - all with no luck.

The good news is that when I boot from my iPod, I can see my hard drive and access its files - it just seems like the Master Boot Record got overwritten by Windows. Here's my post on Apple's Discussion Board.

If nothing else, this is a nice way to get me off the computer for the weekend. Rather than spending all night trying to fix it, I'll wait until Sunday and take it to the Apple Store (pending an easy solution). If all else fails: backup, archive and install should work. This is my primary dev machine at my client, so I will need it for Monday morning.

Shucks, and it sounded like it would be sooooo easy... ;-) Posted in Mac OS X at Dec 05 2003, 05:44:06 PM MST 5 Comments

Comments:

I have no idea what you're talking about... Can you explain what you did again and how windows XP relates to things. Secondly, if you have to have your machine running by Monday you might want to start working on it before Sunday ;-) It doesn't sound like you tried to use firewire target disk mode here. What did you do to teh drive in the machine that won't boot? Sorry I just don't get what formatting the drive on XP has do with things.

Posted by Robert Nicholson on December 06, 2003 at 12:36 AM MST #

I booted my PowerBook in Firewire Target mode by holding down the T button. I then plugged it in (via firewire) to my Windows XP machine. I then tried to get Windows XP to recognize my PowerBook as a hard drive. Part of this procedure (I forget where I read it now), involved "initializing" the disk. This didn't help Windows XP - it still couldn't read the disk. So I gave up, and unplugged everything and tried to boot my PowerBook normally. No luck - it won't boot up now, just gives me the blue blinking icon folder.

Posted by Matt Raible on December 06, 2003 at 05:08 AM MST #

Well Windows XP out of the box doesn't mount HPFS+ filesystems so what made you think that would work? Secondly, I remember a day when a DOS install from floppy would happily format any external drives I had on my machine regardless of what partition type they were. This is simply something I don't trust Microsoft with. I bought a Mac for a reason and that's because I was fedup constantly reinstalling Windows XP and everything else whenever something went wrong. Remember when folks were talking about ipods on Windows XP way back when. I thought then you had to have third party software to see a HPFS+ filesystem. I would be surprised to learn today that you don't. I'd say your best bet right now it to backup and archive and install from CD. By backup I mean /usr/local /Library /Application and preserve users when archive and installing. Good luck.

Posted by Robert Nicholson on December 06, 2003 at 11:28 AM MST #

OS X uses an entirely different filesystem from XP's NTFS. Unless MS has surreptitiously included an HFS+ fs driver in XP, there's no way to view the contents of a mac drive from XP... other than using standard network file-sharing protocols like SMB.

Posted by Jonathan Feinberg on December 06, 2003 at 12:33 PM MST #

Poor guy. I'm trying not to laugh because I feel very bad for him on the "initialize" step.

Posted by AJ on February 07, 2005 at 03:41 PM MST #

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Matt Raible is a Web Architecture Consultant specializing in open source frameworks.
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