Repairing Boot Camp after creating new partition

Your GPT has five partitions. MBR can only have four primary partitions. Therefore they can't be sync'd. Don't let Disk Utility format any partition on this disk, or add any more partitions to this disk. And maintain good backups, especially right before doing an OS upgrade.

Thanks. Yes, I'm staying away from Disk Utility already and will do so on a reinstall. Disk Utility is what lead me to this thread in the first place. 🙂

Hello again i forgot to update this once i fixed my issue.

It turns out Windows 8 wants to boot of the primary internal drive no matter what.

I put the Windows drive in the palmrest bay and the OS X drive in the optibay.

Everything just worked after that. i'm using 7200 RPM drives so i'm not suffering from the decreased bandwidth in the optibay but i would rethink my set up had i used an SSD.

The OS X (bootable) volume? Or the data volume?

An OS X bootable system volume can't be encrypted without a Recovery HD partition to be used as the boot volume. You can encrypt the OS X data volume as you suggest.

Further, modification of the Recovery HD volume is necessary, as well as NVRAM, to make the computer aware that the actual boot volume is Recovery HD, decrypt the OS X volume, and complete the system startup sequence from the encrypted volume. I'm unfamiliar with how to do this outside of FileVault 2. I'm not even sure that diskutil cs convert <device> -stdinpassphrase automatically makes these adjustments.

Chris/Others,

I originally had problems after using disk utility to create an ExFat partition with Bootcamp for a Win7 and OSX 10.8 dual boot machine (Jan 17 posts) I corrected that thanks to your help, but am now facing another issue. I had ~700MB of unallocated /unused space and used Acronis (WIN) to resize my Windows partition to include that extra space. Following, I can still get to my boot options when I hold option down on boot, and I see Windows, Mac, and Recovery. When I select Windows though I just get a black screen with some colored icons and letters - no message, no timeout, no boot windows. Mac boots fine. I now am seeing an error: bogus map when I do a gpt show disk (see second example below - (AFTER)). I included a BEFORE (just below) of what things looked like previously (though this included exFAT which I since cleaned up getting back to 1-4 not 1-5. The other snippets are all current for supporting information. Oh, and I can still see my Windows files/etc. when I'm in Mac - so I know it there, just feel like mapping or pointing is off.

Any suggestions / thoughts? Thank you!!

(BEFORE) sudo gpt -r -vv show disk0

gpt show: disk0: mediasize=251000193024; sectorsize=512; blocks=490234752

gpt show: disk0: Suspicious MBR at sector 0

gpt show: disk0: Pri GPT at sector 1

gpt show: disk0: Sec GPT at sector 490234751

start size index contents

0 1 MBR

1 1 Pri GPT header

2 32 Pri GPT table

34 6

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

409640 324218744 2 GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC

324628384 1269536 3 GPT part - 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC

325897920 320

325898240 39063552 4 GPT part - EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7

364961792 125272064 5 GPT part - EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7

490233856 863

490234719 32 Sec GPT table

490234751 1 Sec GPT header

(AFTER) sudo gpt -r -vv show disk0

gpt show: disk0: mediasize=251000193024; sectorsize=512; blocks=490234752

gpt show: disk0: Suspicious MBR at sector 0

gpt show: disk0: Pri GPT at sector 1

gpt show: error: bogus map

gpt show: unable to open device 'disk0': No such file or directory

sudo gdisk -l /dev/disk0

…

…

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

1 40 409639 200.0 MiB EF00 EFI system partition

2 409640 362255479 172.5 GiB AF00 Customer

3 362255480 363525015 619.9 MiB AB00 Recovery HD

4 363526144 490233855 60.4 GiB 0700 BOOTCAMP

diskutil list /dev/disk0

/dev/disk0

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *251.0 GB disk0

1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1

2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 185.3 GB disk0s2

3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3

4: Microsoft Basic Data WINDOWS 64.9 GB disk0s4

sudo fdisk /dev/disk0

Disk: /dev/disk0 geometry: 30515/255/63 [490234752 sectors]

Signature: 0xAA55

Starting Ending

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

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

1: EE 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 1 - 409639] <Unknown ID>

2: AF 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 409640 - 361845840] HFS+

3: AB 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 362255480 - 1269536] Darwin Boot

*4: 07 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 364961792 - 125272064] HPFS/QNX/AUX

You can never, ever use Windows programs to resize a Windows volume on a dual-boot Macintosh. It damages the GPT. Only applications explicitly made for use with Boot Camp can do this. I suggest you make an immediate backup of your most important OS X information if you haven't already, because that volume has three different sizes in each of the reported partition maps you've supplied.

In the before, there were two Windows basic data partitions, 18GiB and 60.4GiB, I don't see 700MB of unallocated space in the before GPT. In the after GPT from gdisk and MBR from fdisk, the 18GiB volume is gone, only the 60.4GiB remains. Fixing that might be possible with Test Disk and its NTFS-3G utilities, it looks like the resize was interrupted or went wrong; the NTFS volume maybe was resized OK, but the partition map hasn't been changed to reflect that. So that's why Windows wouldn't be able to boot.

So yeah, what you need to do is backup OS X, backup Windows files from the OS X side; and then blow away the disk by repartitioning with a single partition; reinstall OS X (or restore from backup if Time Machine); update it; resize with Boot Camp; reinstall Windows; restore data. I have no easier way of telling you how to repair this kind of damage.

Argh. OK. Given I am going to be reinstalling Windows 7 and OSX 10.8 do you have a recommendation as to how best accomplish this - as I'd like to have dual boot - both a windows and OSX. I've read a lot of posts steering away from BootCamp. And, ideally I would like to be able to do so in that Windows can see files on OSX and OSX can see NTFS on Windows. When I tried NTFS-3G it didn't function, but this was after the NTFS resize. Does it matter if I install OSX or Windows first? Second?

Also, in the before not seeing the 700mb unallocated is because that occurred after I removed the exFAT partition of 18GB. After that was removed, I used OSX Disk Utility to reclaim that space, but oddly, it would not let me use all that it was showing available. So I reduced the number incrementally until it would work therefor leaving me ~700MB unallocated... That is why it is not showing in the before. And in the after, or current, it was consumed by the windows resize that failed....

Thank you very much!

I only use a VM, Boot Camp is a PITA. I can share files using the VM's folder sharing feature.

If you follow Apple's Boot Camp guide exactly, and you don't make changes except to nuke the Windows/Boot Camp volume when you're ready to get rid of it, you get read only JHFS+ from Windows, and read only NTFS from OS X. So you can see files on either OS so long as neither one is encrypted. No partitions can be added, or it breaks the arranagement.

I don't know what version of NTFS-3G you're using, so saying it didn't function is vague. There are only two current versions, the free version is from MacPorts which you have to compile yourself using XCode. Or you buy a license from Tuxera and they give you a compiled binary that's ready to install. Everything else I've ever found googling is way too old and should not be used. There's also Paragon which offers alternative read/write support for OS X.

And as for the order, OS X is always installed first. There is no other way it can work. Make certain you re-repartition the disk, not just erase. And change the Partition Layout setting from Current, to 1 Partition. This is the only supported configuration. Once OS X is installed and updated, you can use Boot Camp Assistant to resize the OS X volume, to allocate space for what will become the Windows volume. Obviously once you get to the Windows installer you must find this volume and reformat it, because Boot Camp Assistant makes it FAT32, not the NTFS format that Windows requires. Etc. All of this is in the Boot Camp guide.

Thank you Chris. Appreciate all your help and knowledge. Got a fun couple days ahead! Learning is sometimes painful.

Oh, at this point, can I simply boot to my recovery partition and then restore from TimeMachine? Is it that simple - any warnings? Never have done that before...

Dear Crhistopher, I had the same problem trying to add a brand new partition in my HD, originally I had an HFS+ partition with osx 10.8 of about 650 GB on it and a partition with widows 7 of about 100 GB. As I told I wanted to expand windows partition in order to install windows 8, first I created a new partition with disk utility, after doing that I lost the windows boot Icon. What I am supposed to do? I tred the steps at the beginning of this topic but aren't working for me, when typing in terminal the command "sudo gdisk /dev/disk0" it says there i no such command available. Hope there are enough information about that.

You should run Windows 8 in a VM. There is still no Boot Camp support for Windows 8. I suggest that you use diskutil to re-merge your OS X and free space partitions back into one. Apple's implementation is really only designed to work safely with OS X and one other operating system, on one disk. Otherwise, gdisk isGPT fdisk, and is always found at Sourceforge.