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Recently I partitioned my Macintosh SSD to dual boot Ubuntu and OSX although I forgot to install rEFit. Now when I turn on my computer it automatically boots into Ubuntu properly. Although If I boot and hold down alt it gives me one option which is to boot from "Macintosh SSD". Once selecting this my computer comes up with normal loading page and then goes to a circle with a line through it. Is it possible to boot back into OSX without reformatting my Macintosh SSD?

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    The circle with a line = cannot find the System folder. Pretty sure you just messed up your OSX.
    – Star OS
    Dec 19, 2015 at 8:29

4 Answers 4

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Commonly if you don’t install refit/refind you can always boot OSX in the way you described.

The icon you see indicates that the bootloader cannot find / boot OSX probably files or partition have been wiped / damaged

Does the HFS file system even seem to be there if you check in Linux? try booting from a OSX Install stick to see if it even detects the contents of your OSX partitions or just do a repair / install from there.

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First, rEFIt has been abandoned for years, and doesn't work properly with the last couple of releases of OS X unless you jump through some extra installation hoops, so you're probably barking up the wrong tree if you're thinking of using rEFIt to solve your problems. That said, there is a fork of rEFIt, called rEFInd, that is up to date and that should work with (relatively) little fuss. (Disclaimer: I maintain rEFInd.) In fact, rEFInd might help you recover:

  1. Using any computer, download the USB flash drive or CD-R version of rEFInd.
  2. Prepare a boot medium from this download.
  3. Try to boot your Mac with this version of rEFInd. If it comes up, you should see options to boot both OS X and Ubuntu. Try them both. (If there are multiple options, try them all. It's OK if some don't work, as long as you can boot both OSes via at least one option each.)
  4. If rEFInd works, you can install it from OS X and it should work fine from the hard disk. You can then clean up the boot menu, if necessary, as described in the rEFInd documentation.

That said, what others have noted is a real concern: The failure symptom you describe could indicate damage to the OS X boot loader. If this is the case, you'll need to either re-install OS X or ask for recovery advice on a Mac forum. Recovery may well be possible, but this just isn't the best place to get that advice.

It's possible that we could offer some more advice if we could see the output (RESULTS.txt file) from the Boot Info Script. Post that file to a pastebin site and post the URL the site gives you here so we can see the output. This information might or might not provide clues about what's going wrong; if it's Mac-specific, the script might not provide the necessary information, and as I've said, a Mac forum would be a better place to ask about such things.

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It sounds like your issue is that your destroyed your OSX installation. You'll need to reinstall:

  1. BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP!!!
  2. Reboot your Mac.
  3. Hold down Command-R during bootup (or Command-Option-R for internet recovery).
  4. Chose to reinstall OSX.
  5. Start from scratch and do it the right way this time using Boot Camp.
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You could reinstall Ubuntu from a live session, and chose this at the installation something else, and mark the root only, and it might work fine this way.

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