Broken Hackintosh - Cant Boot & No Support

[gypsymoth]

Hi All

First post and hopefully you can assist. I'm aware I might not be in the right forum so any directions appreciated

To cut a long story short, my Hackintosh media centre running Snow Leopard is now failing to boot and wont get to the splash screen that had a Chameleon on it. Unfortunately I cant remember the build but it might be iAtkos?

My father was an avid x86 / Hackintosh builder but unfortunately he passed away in November, and despite my computer savvy, I dont have enough to diagnose the problem on my own.

The box itself contains a main drive with the OS, and a second drive with all my music, photos etc... so obviously I'm keen to either (a) get it running again or (b) at the very least, recover my valuable data. I took a backup a few months back but will lose some photos

When I power on the machine, the disk whirrs, it goes to some BIOS splash screens - more slowly than usual - then stops at a certain stage. I'm attaching screenshots to help explain the failure point. The final stage is where it says "DISK BOOT FAILURE. INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER".

http://i39.tinypic.com/wck50l.jpg
http://i41.tinypic.com/2z9cppf.jpg
http://i44.tinypic.com/15drr5x.jpg
http://i39.tinypic.com/2w73kg6.jpg

I suspect it hasnt even got to the OSX load point, and this is a boot / DOS issue but cant be sure

If anyone has seen something similar, or can guide me to a solution of sorts, I'd really really appreciate it

Many thanks
D

[Taisto]

Welcome to our forums gypsymoth.

First of all, im really sorry about your father.

Second of all - what your computer tells you is simply that it cannot find a bootloader, and that's probably because of this message:

"Detecting drives. No drives found"

Seems like something might have happened to the setting, SATA controller or the HDD itself. Can you enter BIOS setup ( F2 or DEL ) and verify the settings for primary drive ? Check this and post the results please.

[Unrealized]

For me it seems like the HDD is dead.