So I've got a mixed bag of news to report back... some good, some bad. It's been a crazy day so I'll try to keep it straight.
Based on the recent posts here I went digging in the bios settings to try and make some changes to get further in the windows installer. I only had a few minutes available to work on it this morning but I figured that if I could get the installer running, I could let it complete while I showered and ate breakfast -- multitasking win.
As luck would have it, I was able to get the installer to run. These are the settings I changed before that successful run:
Alas, this is where I made a huge mistake.
As I was in a bit of a hurry, I forgot to fully shut down and unplug my OSX drive and plug in the intended OSX target drive. The installer finally loaded properly and, in my fit of happiness, I quickly destroyed the partitions on the drive and let the installer run while I left to eat and get cleaned up for the day. It wasn't until I was brushing my teeth that I realized what I had done. I'm glad nobody else was home because that was the loudest I think I've ever cursed.
Gladly, at the advice of another poster here back when I originally installed OSX a few months back, I had a recent clone of the entire drive. So at this point I had:
- ~empty target windows ssd
- my (until today) "daily driver" osx ssd, now trashed and overwritten with Windows
- an approximately 10 day old clone of the daily driver which is my new daily driver.
Thankfully 95% of what would have changed between the last clone and today was in dropbox or otherwise saved to the cloud, so I lost very little. Mostly I lost hair and probably a few years off my life.
I was eventually able to boot up from the clone and use OSX for work today, which was good. I am in fact writing this post on it right now.
Alas, it's not all good news from here.
Currently, I don't think I'm able to get back into the bios settings. I know that it was F12 for boot order and Delete to get into settings, but for whatever reason, at boot, the (sorry if this is the wrong name/description) POST screen doesn't show (the one where it shows some basic details and then says to hit delete to enter setup). It's just black for maybe 10-15 seconds before showing the clover bootloader. I've tried tapping F12 every 1/2 to 1 second during a cold boot, and that doesn't seem to do anything useful. If anything it just stays on a black screen ~forever. Same for pressing Delete instead of F12 repeatedly at boot.
I believe that I was able to get into the bios ONCE after I had gotten this far, and I didn't change anything at that time. But I haven't been able to find a way back in yet. I believe that it may be something to do with having the windows drive on P0, so I'm going to try moving OSX to P0 and Windows elsewhere and see if that won't sort it out. This is based on the diagnostic led's on the motherboard: The times that it sits at a black screen, the 4th light (Boot) stays lit.
I also don't seem to be able to boot from any USB sticks at the moment, which in my opinion is much worse. I am currently operating on an OSX drive with no way to boot into CloneZilla to make a new backup. I made a fresh CloneZilla USB stick, but haven't been able to boot from it. That's currently my top priority, because I'm terrified of trashing the last disk that I have on hand and need in order to do my job.
I'm spending some time tonight trying to find a way to get a good clone of the working OSX drive.