...my next one would be Screwdriver and pliers... (only for the brave !)
;-)
Or the desperate! I was ready to do that the other night, but I think I would have used tweezers instead of pliers.:wink:
I ran boot camp and partitioned the drive of my Macbook Pro and put in what I thought would be a bootable CD of WinXP. Ummm.... guess it wasn't (why should I be surprised? It was the software on my XP machine at work that burned the CD...). The screen went black. The following line appeared at the top of the screen:
operating system missing.....
The bottom dropped out of my stomach. I had a momentary thought that everything was gone from the Mac. But then I remembered that it would only muck up the windows partition.....and it thought that it was holding a bootable CD and unless I could get that CD out... it wasn't going to change its mind anytime soon!
And the computer would not turn off. (push the power button for a few seconds, unplug it from it's adaptor....let the batteries go dead maybe?) It wouldn't do anything. I tried every Hail Mary combo I could. (control option delete, command delete, control option command, etc.) I thought I would either have to rip the batteries out of the back of the 'puter or go for the tweezers to take the disk out of the drive. Except the danged thing was still spinning and this is a brand new machine. I was distraught and desperate.
I called my sister the Mac geek. She gave me a few more things to try. Then.... she said, "You held down the off button, right?" Of course I did!
But ...not long enough! Now I held it down for about 15-20 seconds (I reckon), and the machine finally turned off!
After that, I just had to turn it on and hold the option key (which is what the bootcamp instructions said in their trouble shooting guide. ) Then choose to boot from the mac partition, and eject that wretched disk!
Anyway....to make a long story short (!?), hold that power key down for much longer than you think you would have to!
Hope this helps someone else and keeps them from going for the pliers!
