Repairing Boot Camp after creating new partition

Hello!

I see how well you've helped these fine people and i hope you have experience and graciousness to help me 🙂

This problem has been racking my brain for the past few days now.

For context, on my old macbook i replaced the SuperDrive with another hard drive and decided to use that drive to install bootcamp.

I use the bootcamp utility to partition the full disk for my windows installation. on restart i realize the windows disk isn't capable of installing from an external dvd drive (go figure) and i didn't have a USB stick to boot the installation off of at the time. I had the clever idea to use Parallels to install windows using the Bootcamp partition as the disk instead of a virtual disk. once i got that set up i try to restart with alt/option but i couldn't see the windows drive. Through my research i found out that parallels doesnt' write teh MBR to the disk and instead saves it in a virtual file. I figure out how to write the virtual file using the "dd" command to replace the physical drive's MBR and Success! i was able to boot into windows and have been using it since.

a few days ago i got a new macbook and i figured i could move the drive to the new macbook with the same setup. unfortunately i get the "No Boot Device" error although i can still boot through parallels. the MBR hasn't changed and just to be sure i used "dd" to write the MBR again with parallels file without success.

(Apologies i don't know how to post the properly formatted code)

here is my diskutil list

I am using FileVault on my Macintosh HD so maybe that's why it shows up in /disk2 when there are only 2 disks present.

here are the result of sudo gpt -r -vv show disk1

and sudo fdisk /dev/disk1

i don't know if it's worth noting that i sometimes see my second drive as /dev/disk0 rather then /dev/disk1 you see now

The /dev/diskX assignment varies between reboots, that's normal. In the above screen shots disk0s2 is the partition on which an encrypted Core Storage volume is located, and disk2 is the unlocked and mounted version of it (i.e. disk2 is a logical volume)

Try posting the results from:

sudo dd if=/dev/disk1 count=1 2>/dev/null | hexdump -C

Christopher,

I hope this hasnt become too tiresome for you as I have the same problem but didnt have the confidence to proceed without you walking me through it. I have an iMac that has an SSD as the main OS X boot volume, and a 1TB internal HDD that was being used for simple storage for OS X as SSD's are quite small. I had a 256GB bootcamp partition on the HDD with windows 8....all was well, then I got the bright idea to create a bootable backup of the SSD, so I downloaded Carbon Copy Cloner and created the bootable clone after creating a 120GB partition on the HDD for the clone.

I can boot into Mac OS X on the SSD and the bootable clone, but I can't boot into the bootcamp partition. I followed the first steps on the first page of this thread and here are the results:

I probably would have gone further except I didn't have 5 GPTs, whatever that is, I only had 3....maybe because the HDD isn't the OS X boot volume? Anyway, I appreciate any assistance you could give me. I suppose I could just wipe the bootcamp partition and start from scratch, but I wouldn't be able to put a bootcamp partition on an HDD with 2 partitions already would I? Starting from scratch is such a headache though.

My bootcamp installation of Windows is broken or at least mislocated. A program, probably Carbon Copy Cloner, objected to the fully functional drive, which had bootable partitions for MtnLion1, SnoLeopard, and WINDW732 (Win7 32bit), and offered to give it a Recovery HD slice. Foolishly, I agreed. Thus I ended up with the following:

Code:

$ diskutil list

/dev/disk1

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *500.1 GB disk1

1: EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1

2: Apple_HFS MtnLion1 412.3 GB disk1s2

3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 784.2 MB disk1s3

4: Apple_HFS SnoLeopard 40.3 GB disk1s4

5: Microsoft Basic Data WINDW732 45.6 GB disk1s5

The Windows volume will still boot as a virtual machine using Virtual Box.

Startup Manager does not see the Windows volume. System Preferences>Startup Disk sees the Windows volume. Alas, when it is chosen as the startup disk the boot fails with a Win7 error message of “No bootable device --- insert boot disk and press any key.”

I think the volume might work again if I can restore it so it looks like this, so that Bootcamp installation will again be in slice 4 where it was very happy:

Code:

/dev/disk1

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *500.1 GB disk1

1: EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1

2: Apple_HFS MtnLion1 412.3 GB disk1s2

3: Apple_HFS SnoLeopard 40.3 GB disk1s3

4: Microsoft Basic Data WINDW732 45.6 GB disk1s4

I downloaded gdisk 0.8.6. I respect the command line. I’d like to use it to fix my drive, but I don’t want to damage it any further. If I understand this thread, I think for help I should list the output below.

user$ sudo gpt -r -vv show disk1

Password:

gpt show: disk1: mediasize=500107862016; sectorsize=512; blocks=976773168

gpt show: disk1: PMBR at sector 0

gpt show: disk1: Pri GPT at sector 1

gpt show: disk1: Sec GPT at sector 976773167

start size index contents

0 1 PMBR

1 1 Pri GPT header

2 32 Pri GPT table

34 6

40 409600 1 GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B

409640 805216648 2 GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC

805626288 1531680 3 GPT part - 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC

807157968 78626792 4 GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC

885784760 1984328

887769088 89004032 5 GPT part - EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7

976773120 15

976773135 32 Sec GPT table

976773167 1 Sec GPT header

I don't actually care if the Recovery HD partition gets removed, as long as I recover the ability to boot to Windows 7 via Bootcamp or pseudo-gdisk-almost-Bootcamp. I do not need to use FileVault2 on this drive.

Here is a little more info:

For future reference, please don't delete the command you used to get the result. What you've provided are the commands for the SSD, which only contains the OS X and Recovery HD partitions. There is no Boot Camp/Windows partition on the disk. So need to repeat the commands with /dev/disk1 instead of /dev/disk0.

Thank you!

here's the hexdump

sudo dd if=/dev/disk1 count=1 2>/dev/null | hexdump -C

You did not provide the result from

sudo fdisk /dev/disk1

That you are getting the error you're getting tells me the hybrid MBR may be intact but you have bootloader problems that need to be repaired. Difficult to be sure without seeing the MBR.

oh sorry i didn't realize you were respnding to someone else. 😉

OK look, there are currently THREE PEOPLE who are asking for help at the exact same time. So everyone needs to read the post header to know who is being talked to: Jan 23, 2013 3:47 PM(in response to autnagrag)

When I asked for fdisk results, it was for autnagrag.

OK re: the hexdump. This seems viable but does not contain the error you're getting, so it's not a problem with the MBR bootloader. It could be a BIOS error (Macs use a CSM-BIOS for booting Windows), or it could be an ntldr problem. So I don't see any way around this other than to find a Windows repair disk, or install disk and try using Startup Repair. I know that Windows doesn't like being moved around to different hardware in particular it flat out won't boot if the CPU families are different.

That makes sense. I went from a haswell i5 to an ivy bridge i7. I'll try the System Repair option and report back.

Any reason why it works in Parallels, wouldn't that count as a completely new environment?

Again Thank you for your help and sorry for the confusion earlier.

$ sudo fdisk /dev/disk1

Password:

Disk: /dev/disk1 geometry: 60801/255/63 [976773168 sectors]

Signature: 0xAA55

Starting Ending

#: id cyl hd sec - cyl hd sec [ start - size]

------------------------------------------------------------------------

1: EE 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 1 - 976773167] <Unknown ID>

2: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused

3: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused

4: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused

Sorry Chris! Here is the updated info:

Thanks for all your help!

I'm not sure why you're getting the error you're getting at all because you don't even have a hybrid MBR on that disk, so that's why Windows won't boot. So you'll need to use gdisk to create a new hybrid MBR on disk1. Realize that every time you reboot, there is a change the physical disks swap designations between disk0 and disk1 so you have to check with diskutil list if you reboot, before making changes to the partition to make sure you're changing the correct disk.

Also, you should do an fdisk command on the other disk, disk0, to see if it has a hybrid MBR that's causing confusion.