Lion update destroyed my Windows 7 Bootcamp!

See if this works: from another user.

"I put in my Windows 7 intallation disk, booted past the first screen into the recovery tools, and tried the automatic recovery option, and wonders of wonders, it worked. It's now showing up just fine and I can boot into it, so it looks like all Lion did was kill off access to it in the partition table without messing up the data, in a way that Windows could correct."

Darryl Mylrea wrote:

No, that didn't work. When I boot off my Windows 7 DVD and choose REPAIR, there are no installations of Windows 7 to choose.

To make matters look worse, in disk utility the Windows 7 Partition shows as FAT (MS-DOS).

On my MBP 2011, I have the same setup and the bootcamp partition shows correctly as NTFS.

While I was booted into Windows repair, I went to the command line and used DISKPART to look at things.

The volume is there, it's 111GB as it's supposed to be, but shows the format as RAW and the free space as 111GB.

This really ticks me off that a simple update would completely bork my Windows 7. Sure, I can redo it, but that's not the point. Why is Lion even touching that partition?

Anyone else have any other ideas? PLEASE??

My idea is to wonder why you are not restoring the backup you sensibly made before choosing to bork your (presumably functioning) Snow Leopard installation

That being the case I would use Boot Camp to remove the partition then create a new one and reinstall Windows. You cannot recover what is no longer there.

Boot Camp only creates a FAT formatted partition. It's the Windows installer that reformats it to NTFS.

Darryl Mylrea wrote:

"Presumably functioning"?? It's the installation of SL that came with my new iMac 27" 2011 model, about 1 month old. So, yes, it was "presumably functioning" just fine, along with my Windows 7 installed via Bootcamp.

It's a relatively new installation, so it's not that I lost critical data (it's on my server), but it's the time I have to take now to reinstall everything. I'd sure like to know what you think I should be backing up with that would let me restore my Windows 7 partition from within Lion??? Is there such a thing?

Thanks, too, for your constructive "idea". You've provided mountains of help.

FWIW, I have been reading and following plenty about Lion since it came out. I have not heard anything about it destroying the bootcamp partition.

I am not aware that I said anything about "let me restore my Windows 7 partition from within Lion???

But I did suggest that prior to replacing an operating system backing up is a good idea, as you don't seem to agree we'll leave it at that.

How many programs are there for backing up Windows installations, let me count the ways.

Like I said, we can disagree