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Partition problem with Win 7 and Lion

I have a 2011 Mac Mini with two hard drives - the original 500GB drive and a SSD. The SSD is laid out as follows:

$ diskutil list

/dev/disk0

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *60.0 GB disk0

1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1

2: Apple_HFS OSX Lion SSD 19.0 GB disk0s2

3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3

4: Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP W7 40.2 GB disk0s4


It has my two bootable operating systems and works fine (for now) so I am happy to leave it alone.


The problem is with the second drive. It has:

1) EFI partition 200M

2) Original Lion install 40G HFS+

3) Original recovery partition 650M

4) Space set aside for OSX HFS+ 160G (has some big files in it)

5) Space set aside for Windows NTFS 300G (no files in it yet)


I think there is a problem with MBR vs GPT and Disk Utility vs Disk Management.

Disk Utility or fdisk calls it

/dev/disk1

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *500.1 GB disk1

1: EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1

2: Microsoft Basic Data 37.6 GB disk1s2 (these entries are wrong)

3: Microsoft Basic Data 650.0 MB disk1s3

4: Microsoft Basic Data 161.5 GB disk1s4

5: Microsoft Basic Data NTFS stuff 300.1 GB disk1s5 (this entry seems right)


and I cannot access the partitions in Lion.


Gdisk calls it:

GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 0.8.1


Partition table scan:

MBR: hybrid

BSD: not present

APM: not present

GPT: present


Found valid GPT with hybrid MBR; using GPT.

Disk /dev/disk1: 976773168 sectors, 465.8 GiB

Logical sector size: 512 bytes

Disk identifier (GUID): 0000303E-4D40-0000-1B4C-0000F9090000

Partition table holds up to 128 entries

First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 976773134

Partitions will be aligned on 8-sector boundaries

Total free space is 2061 sectors (1.0 MiB)


Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name

1 40 409639 200.0 MiB EF00 EFI system partition

2 409640 73900919 35.0 GiB 0700 Customer (name is wrong)

3 73900920 75170455 619.9 MiB 0700 Recovery HD

4 75170456 390588423 150.4 GiB 0700 stuff

5 390590464 976773119 279.5 GiB 0700 Basic data partition (name is wrong)


Windows Disk Management is happy to see inside the HFS partitions, so I know all my files are at least still there. I had a 5th NTFS partition formatted, but upon going into Lion and back, it disappeared.


I think ideally what I would like to have is a spare Lion + recovery partition on this drive in case my SSD barfs, then a big NTFS partition to hold my Windows files. I guess merging the 40G OSX and 160G HFS+ partitions will be ok. Could the problem be related to MBR having a limit of 4 partitions? There isn't any data on this drive that isn't backed up, but I would rather do this partition fixing shuffle without having to restore big files. Any suggestions on how to proceed?

Mac Mini

Posted on Dec 29, 2011 11:18 PM

Reply
2 replies

Dec 30, 2011 10:52 PM in response to beanbag

I managed to fix the problem. First I used Disk Utility to delete the NTFS partition. It hung during the process, so I quit it, and the partition was deleted anyway. Next, I used gdisk to change the partition type from 0700 to AF00 and AB00 for the Lion and Recovery partitions respectively. It worked and I can access the partitions under OSX again. Thanks, everybody, you've been super helpful.

Partition problem with Win 7 and Lion

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