Macbook pro help needed

Update. All sorted. My wife found a combination of key presses that restored the boot sequence.

I suspect the fact that it’s running an SSD instead of its original drive might have been the cause of the installation failures.

Tim

How old is old? Any ideas what MacOS version it has? Maybe it only ever supported Windows 7.

There's normally a boot menu when you hold down 'Option' ('Alt' on a normal keyboard). But only useful if there's a MacOS partition to boot into. If you have a USB stick with a MacOS installer you can boot into it here (requires another Mac to make the stick)

Recovery mode is Command-R held on boot, but it might not work if there's no OS. ('Command' = the Windows key on a PC keyboard)

Try Option-Command-R to boot into a recovery that will download the most recent supported MacOS from the internet and install it.

Option-Command-Shift-R will download the version of MacOS it was shipped with from the factory.

Once that's done, maybe try Boot Camp again with Windows 7. Then see if you can then 'upgrade' it to Windows 10 from within Windows.

Theo

What worked for me was to 1) hold down the option key on start-up until the disk/boot icons appear. 2) Then press the eject key (or F12) on the keyboard. Pressing eject on its own did not work. "

"Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the left mouse button until the disc ejects."

The left mouse button, is the mouse button on a "real mouse", not the Mac doorstop mouse :-) My doorstop mouse is still in the original baggy (a plan to sell it as a relic to the faithful).

It's hard to say what state the main storage is in right now. MBR disks are relatively easy to clean. Just wiping the MBR (first sector, 512 byte length), is enough. Whereas GPT has an MBR, a primary partition table, a secondary partition table. Your first application of "dd" would normally wipe the first two items, whereas the last item is at the end of the drive (as far as I know). It's harder to use seek/skip, to precision target the secondary table. Then, if the secondary table remains, other software sniffs it, and says stuff like "since this smells like GPT, I'm making this GPT again". That is why GPT partitioning is the gift that keeps on giving. Windows has "diskpart" and the "clean" command which can be applied to a selected disk. It cleans all three parts of GPT, leaving no "smell" to trip over later.

There are, of course, ways to fix that. But then it would depend on what is in your lab. Angle grinder always works.

I use a utility called "disktype" to dump a picture of the partitions. It's a text utility. It is not available for Windows, it's on Cygwin, it's on Linux.

One of the first steps in brain surgery is to back up the hard drive. Then you can restore your backup, if in trouble. My first (crude) backups were done with dd. It's available practically everywhere. Windows has a third party offering. The Terminal on the Mac, likely has a dd. I used dd to back up the Macintosh HD on mine. There was an FTP option, and you can dd the disk and send if over FTP to another computer (the other computer has the FTP server). The GbE NIC on my Mac is the fastest I/O it's got, and that's how I transferred the hard drive contents, out of the machine.

ftp> binary # Transfer in binary mode, to avoid corruption ftp> put "|dd if=/dev/sda bs=73728" sda # The thing in front of "dd" is the "pipe symbol" aka vertical bar # The block size 73728 is 9 * 8192 and most disks have that # number as a factor in their declared total disk size. # Modern disks give full transfer rate, at bs=8192 or bigger.

You can restore an image later, with ftp and dd, but of course the Terminal is trashed at that point, so you need a "bare metal boot OS" to have a dd command. I have an old Ubuntu PowerPC LiveDVD that I use for the PowerPC Mac I own.

I don't like to physically open that Mac (a scissor-style case), which is why I learned how to do my stuff using weird techniques.

Bootcamp is one thing. A hosting software like VirtualBox is another possibility. It allows the Host OS and one of more Guest OSes, to run at the same time. Subject to the limits of available Host RAM for the work.

If you are reinstalling Mac OS on a Mac, the installer does not auto-partition for you. The first step is something like Disk First Aid (launched via the DVD?), and setting up partitions in there. Then the second step is to use the installer, on the now-freshly-partitioned disk drive. Some other OSes offer a default partitioning scheme. The only thing that the Mac disk lacked, was a "hint" that DFA was the first step.

Paul