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I am a pilot that has my logbook on the windows side of my iMac. Windows has been failing to boot up gives me an 000021a error every time. I have tried booting in last known good configuration and is safe mode but nothing gets windows to boot. I am trying to find out if I can access my logbook file even though windows is not booting. Anyone with any words of advice?!

RMcNa
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  • Is Windows on a NTFS partition on your iMac? What version of Mac OS are you running on the HFS+ partition? – Daniel Apr 04 '12 at 00:37
  • Is it a bootcamp partition? – Digitalchild Apr 04 '12 at 01:18
  • It is on a bootcamp partition. I want to say that I could get a bootable windows cd and be fine...I think. – RMcNa Apr 04 '12 at 01:29
  • Can you give us the output of the disktutil list command? Open a Terminal window, run that command, paste it in to your answer. You should be able to read from that bootcamp partition from OS X and at least save your data before you try repairing windows on it. Also: have you tried rebooting your Mac and just booting in to the Windows partition (i.e. not using Fusion to run Windows off the partition)? – Ian C. Apr 04 '12 at 01:53

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What you need to do is as follows:

  1. create a new VM
  2. Install Windows on that VM
  3. Shutdown the New VM
  4. In the New VM preferences, add the .vmdk for your old VM as a secondary drive on the new VM
  5. Start up your new VM and you old drive should now be visible as a secondary drive

Browse to the files you need to retrieve, copy to the new VM and you are done, all bar reversing the above and deleting the old VM

Stu Wilson
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    With one minor correction, this might work well: the disk to add to the new VM isn't the old VM's .vmdk file, it's the bootcamp partition for Windows (his old VM used that partition). This is probably simpler than trying to read the NTFS bootcamp partition from OS X (which is where I was going with my comment and request on the question). – Ian C. Apr 04 '12 at 15:37
  • True and thx for the clarification, my original thought was just to install MacFuse and see if he could browse the data that way. – Stu Wilson Apr 04 '12 at 16:43
  • Yea, I was going to give detailed NTFS-reading instructions once he updated with the diskutil output. Let's see if he comes back... – Ian C. Apr 04 '12 at 17:21