Can I recover my bootcamp and hard drive partitions?

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Can I recover my bootcamp and hard drive partitions?

Macbook Pro “15 Late 2013 2.3Ghz. It was stupid of me to take this so lightly. I had a small partition that I had made in my boot camp windows 8.1 that I wasn’t using. So I used mini partition tool to merge that and the bootcamp drive, it asked me to restart and I did. Well it completed the process and rebooted, but it doesn’t load up. The initial music plays and then it plays a a very tiny clip of that music and stays stuck on a black screen with no errors; sort of like when a game freezes and the music clips and loops.

So then I forced a reboot with the powerbutton. Still the same. Then I held down option after booting. To my surprised it only showed Recovery and Bootcamp options. If I select bootcamp, the above explained situation happens.

I selected recovery and went into disk utility. It only showed disk02, recovery HD, bootcamp and under disk 1 OSX Base System. I’ll attach an image. The 02 and Bootcamp are greyed out. I cannot mount them. I cannot erase them.

At one point when I clicked verify on 02, it gave an error “Unable to repair while live”. I felt positive then went to try and do a reinstall of OS X, but can’t select that drive because it’s in MS-DOS(FAT32) format. So I went back and now the drive is greyed out again. Verifying and repairing gives errors, and can’t be mounted.

I tried fsck fy in singleuser mode but it gave a command not found error.

When I click the 02 and bootcamp drives, they only show capacity now, and “-“ all other info.

What can I do to resolve this? Is there anyway the files are still there? I was hoping maybe I could reinstall OSX then repair the Bootcamp drive some how. What are my options?

Edit: I did an NVRAM reset and now the disk0s2 shows its format as Mac OS Extended(pic attached)

Edit: I tried to run a repair and it gave this error(pic below)

MacBook Pro Retina

Posted on Nov 8, 2021 9:15 AM

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Answer 1

HWTech

Level 9

69,248 points

Nov 9, 2021 6:07 PM in response to Layman92

In the past when I've seen a partition listed like "disk0s2" instead of a volume name it indicated the volume was encrypted, the volume has a file system that macOS does not recognize, or the volume was corrupt. With later versions of macOS this is not necessarily true as I have seen some perfectly normal & healthy volumes depicted this way recently (not sure why).

As for the Secure Erase I'm not sure the old version of Parted Magic will boot a Mac anymore. I tried creating a bootable Parted Magic USB stick last year and was unable to boot an Apple laptop with newer system firmware. I tried creating the bootable Parted Magic USB stick in several ways with no success. I know that the old Parted Magic image did work at one time. Since it is an old version of Parted Magic that had not changed in years it means the Apple system firmware updates have made the older version of Parted Magic incompatible. This is similar to why some users are no longer able to boot the Apple Diagnostics or Apple Hardware Tests. It may depend on what firmware revision has been applied to your laptop whether the old free version of Parted Magic will boot. I've never used the newer paid version of Parted Magic, but it is just a customized Linux boot disk so it should work (in theory).

It is possible to create and use a bootable Knoppix Linux USB stick to perform the secure erase (assuming the SSD supports the feature). Since you are familiar with the command line, this may be an option (Linux uses a different format for the drive identifiers "sda", "sdb", etc. instead of "disk0", "disk1", etc.). I would have to write the instructions though unless you can find another one of my posts with the Knoppix instructions.

You could also use Knoppix to just overwrite the partition table. Many times just overwriting the partition table is enough to get Disk Utility to erase a drive since Disk Utility gets confused if the partitions/file systems are not as macOS expects. I'm guessing overwriting the partition table is all that is needed since your issues started after modifying the partitions.

You can attempt to overwrite the partition table on the macOS command line in case the "diskutil" command is having issues. Try this to destroy the partition table on the macOS command line:

dd  if=/dev/zero  of=/dev/disk0  bs=100m  count=10

If you get the error of partitions being mounted, then try the force unmount command I provided in the earlier post before trying the "dd" command again. It would be best to boot from a bootable macOS USB installer if possible since I'm not sure if booting into the local recovery mode will keep a volume mounted (Internet Recovery Mode should also work if it boots into macOS 10.13+). However, this macOS option will probably fail as well like the "diskutil" commands did, but it may be worth trying since you already have the boot disks and macOS knowledge.

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Can I recover my bootcamp and hard drive partitions?

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