Possible to repair disk problem created with bootcamp?

Question

Level 1

4 points

Possible to repair disk problem created with bootcamp?

Hi

I recently upgraded and gave my old mid-2012 Macbook Pro Retina (16GB RAM, 256GB SSD) to my son. He's been playing with it and decided he wanted to install Windows, so he used bootcamp and it looks like he's made quite the mess. When he gave it back to me it wouldn't boot at all, but I managed to use Internet Recovery to reinstall Catalina. Not sure what he did but I can ask if it's helpful. :)

Currently it does boot into Catalina, but it's showing boot errors on the disk, and diskutil will only give me a 50GB partition for the mac, and I can't create any new partitions or get rid of the "Microsoft Reserved" partition. Boot camp says it can't do anything because the HD doesn't have a boot partition.

I have a bit of IT background, but I'm not super technical. I started googling diskutil options but I'm lost.

I feel like the machine should still be usable and has decent specs. But is this fixable? Any tips or suggestions on where to go from here? I'm not familiar with low-level mac concepts but I can work through diskutil commands if anyone can give me some direction.

I attached screenshots of the diskutil output below.

In a perfect world we'd keep Catalina working on its 50GB partition (as it is now) and use the rest for Windows.

Thank you for reading this far! :)

MacBook Pro Retina

Posted on Jun 23, 2022 1:11 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

HWTech

Level 9

60,248 points

Jun 25, 2022 2:03 PM in response to zumafan

I would create a bootable macOS 10.15 USB installer just so you have more options in case you encounter any issues while using Internet Recovery Mode (Command + Option + R).

How to create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support

When you boot from the macOS installer (USB or Internet Recovery Mode) use Disk Utility to erase the whole physical SSD as GUID partition and APFS (top option). Within Disk Utility you will need to click "View" and select "Show All Devices" so that the physical SSD appears on the left pane of Disk Utility. The physical SSD will be called something like "Apple SSD ....". Once you erase the whole physical SSD, quit Disk Utility and select the "Reinstall macOS" option. You should now have the full storage space of your SSD available to macOS.

If you still don't have full use of the SSD, then post the output of the "diskutil" command again with the new drive layout. Sometimes it is possible to do something to the drive to make macOS have trouble properly working with the drive even when erasing it.

FYI, when posting the output of "diskutil" you should add the "internal" option to the command which will limit the output to the internal drive(s) and their virtual/synthesized volumes which makes reading the output much easier.

diskutil  list  internal

Reply

Answer 2

zumafan Author

Level 1

4 points

Jun 27, 2022 11:17 AM in response to HWTech

Hi thank you! That got us back to having a base Catalina install with access to the full 256GB disk. Next step installing Windows, wish us luck. :)

Reply

Possible to repair disk problem created with bootcamp?

Similar questions