Yesterday I decided to move my osx86 to the laptops internal HDD so to do that I partition magic’ed the Dell media direct partition and freed some space on the previous one so that I had almost 15 GiB of free space. I then shrunk the partiton and created the new partiotn for OSX. Booted the JAs 10.4.8 and started installation but was unable to format the partion OSX to HFS+ from FAT32. Kept trying and what did it I dont know.
Then fixed my cpus=1 and platform=osx86pc in com.apple.boot.plist. then fixed Broadcom 440x. I then reinstalled some apps and ran HDA patcher for the audio. Now I wanted to boot xp as primary so I decided to make xp partion active and use chain0 to boot. All was good till this point [from here on I suffered to my laziness and Instead of two minutes work I am now writing this post.] I could do it with windows 98 bootable cd with fdisk within 2 minutes but I dont know why I popped in xP Intallation cd and I dont know what in the world made me run the windows setup in repair mode. It kept on running for two hows and just was stuck on Installing Devices. I restarted I again took more than an hour and got stuck. I just thought of swithing off bluetooth and then restarted the setup and this time it was the trick that did it. Setup was done and everything running and the time was 6 AM and this all had started happening at 1 AM [I didnt sleep]. Now for some fun I decide dto make more space on mac partion so i deleted it from disk management and then did increase some space. This time I was unable to format It to HFS+ and I kept on trying and and trying. Tried almost every thing and in the meanwhile I dozed off at 11 AM. Woke up at 2:30 PM had some lunch. Then decided to look for some utility to format Fat32 to HFS. Downloaded Macdrive 6. Installed and restarted the computer and then right clicked the partion to format to HFS+ and selected format and then came the blue lightning strike the BSOD and everything froze for a moment and then the computer rebooted and when I passed BIOS all was FUBARed on the HDD. Warning beeps with ERROR “NO BOOT LOADER PRESENT PRESS F1 TO CONTINUE F2 TO RUN SETUP and F5 TO RUN DIAGNOSTICS”
Ran diags. It showed HDD test fail with error code 2000-01426.
Called dell and also called my local vendor to enquire the prices of the 2.5 inch SATA HDD for my laptop. Dell representative told the whole crap they are told in Tech training [I also worked in DELL tech support for EMEA for five months just to see how they do it.] No use calling dell But I sure will renew my warranty and get my HDD replaced as soon as I have money or maybe I will not. I removed the HDD from the laptop. Searched for the SATA IDE cable and power adapter from my old motherboard. Found it in first attempt. Then I hooked It upto my Desktop. I was not able to create PRIMARY or EXTENDED partions but was able to create some new types which showed in brown color named SIMPLE types in Disk management. Back to laptop same error no boot devices present. It even failed to boot from cd. Decided to run low level format as the last resort. Downloaded a utility and ran it. It took more than 1 hour and I had somthing to work with. Put it back in laptop and voila this time it booted from xp cd. Created a 20 GiB partion and Installed windows and well. All ran perfectly bu on running the daigs I get the same failure code.
Now I am writing this post on my laptop with the same FUBARed HDD revived.
I dont know what happened and would be thankful to every one and any one who enlightens me.