Repairing Boot Camp after creating new partition

Christopher:

Sorry I was unclear. I have rEFIt. Holding down Command-s takes me to the rEFIt shell. Holding it down while selecting the OS is not possible - the moment I press it I go back into the shell. And pressing Command-s immediately after selecting has no effect.

Should I perhaps remove rEFIt?

I don't know that rEFInd will have any different behavior, but that is the current code base. rEFIt is no longer maintained. To remove rEFIt as the default boot entry, simply zap the PRAM with command-option-P-R at the startup chime, at the second chime switch from command-option-P-R to command-s.

OK. I was able to get into Single User Mode zapping the PRAM. I then ran the commands above.

"fsck_hfs -fy /dev/rdisk0s2" ran fine and said it did some changes to the disk.

"fsck_hfs -r /dev/rdisk0s2" ran fine for a while. Then it started coughing up error messages - something about the volume Macintosh being mounted, and something about "errno=5". Then it went into some kind of panic and just started to repeat a set of 15 or so lines over and over. One line said that to reboot I had to use ëxit". But at that point exit didn't work; nothing did.

So I powered off and rebooted. Nothing seems to have changed. rEFIt is still here, the partitions seem to be the same, and the machine still works.

How about me just getting rid of "rEFIt"- I don't need it for the moment, no Ubuntu, just OS X and Win 7? And then running whatever commands needed to get info to see how things look?

"fsck_hfs -r /dev/rdisk0s2" ran fine for a while. Then it started coughing up error messages - something about the volume Macintosh being mounted, and something about "errno=5". Then it went into some kind of panic and just started to repeat a set of 15 or so lines over and over. One line said that to reboot I had to use ëxit". But at that point exit didn't work; nothing did.

The problems with the file system need to be repaired. So you'll need to repeat this until it's fixed, or you're going to end up needing to repartition the drive with a single partition, and restore everything from backups.

Nothing seems to have changed.

These are preliminary steps to make sure the file system is healthy before doing resizing/merging partitions.

How about me just getting rid of "rEFIt"-

rEFIt has nothing to do with the file system problems.

Christopher!

Thanks for the quick reply!

OK. So I get that I have to repeat the steps and that the errors have to be fixed. Is there something I should be looking for? Some message to take note of? Is there anything else I should do - dismount the drive (I don't know how to do that in single user mode)? Anything I should make a note of and report back?

Oh - I also get that rEFIt has nothing to do with the disk problems. But getting rid of it may make it easier to get into Single User Mode, was what I thought 🙂

Single user mode

fsck_hfs -r /dev/rdisk0s2

You're looking for the message "The volume <name> was repaired successfully. ****The volume was modified.****"

It's normal for this to take a while, especially on the Rebuilding catalog B-tree step. It's normal to get some errors like Invalid volume file count, and that the Volume header needs minor repairs.

If you get anything else repeat the above command; if you get the same error message as before, you'll need to forego the recapture of space by file system resize/merge, get Windows booting again, make a backup of that - and then prepare to totally repartition/erase the drive and restore from backups.

Whether successful or not, the correct way to reboot is to type reboot then return.

OK, thanks!!

I will retry the fixes for the drive errors in a little while and get back to you.

But how do I get the Bootcamp up again?

Try going into Disk Utility, clicking on the Mac B partition, and deleting it with the minus button. In theory you'll now have four partitions instead of five, and Disk Utility should recreate the hybrid MBR that will enable Windows to boot.

OK. I first did the singleuser commands. They seemed to work, I got ** The vol Macintosh HD repaired successfully **** and The volume was modified.

However, I also got "hfs_mount: hfs reload returned 5 on Macintosh HD", and

üpdate/reload: mount for / failed: Input/output error"

Then I did the removal of the Mac Stuff partition using Disk Utility. It removed it, but the Bootcamp is still not bootable. My diskutil list returns:

So what now?

mount for / failed: Input/output error

That's not reassuring. Go to Disk Utility, click on the drive (not the volume name, the one size make model), then click on the Info button in the tool bar. There should be a line S.M.A.R.T. Status - copy paste everything below that to the forum.

Back in Terminal, type this and report the result:

sudo fdisk /dev/disk0

Christopher: Here is the info

sudo fdisk /dev/disk0:

Signature: 0xAA55

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

4: 0C 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 300509184 - 189724672] Win95 FAT32L

You wrote to Berend de Mayer

Ok anytime you have to use the power switch to force off power, you've going to have some level of JHFS+ corruption. The journaling doesn't make it any safer, it just makes repairs go faster. So I suggest you reboot in single user mode (with command s) and

fsck -fy

<wait>

then do

fsck_hfs -r /dev/rdisk0s2

<wait>

fsck_hfs -Ra /dev/rdisk0s2

fsck_hfs -Re /dev/rdisk0s2

I gulped because I have sometimes had to force off power. The first time I booted into single user mode and ran these commands, it seemed to me I got a performance boost. Today, I finally enabled TRIM support on my SSD. (I could not enable it successfully by the approach that emphasizes editing this file:

/System/Library/Extensions/IOAHCIFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/IOAHCIBlockStorage .kext/Contents/MacOS/IOAHCIBlockStorage

but Mountain Tweaks.app did the trick.

Because I forced power off once, I booted into single user mode, but the results of

fsck_hfs -r /dev/rdisk0s2

were woeful indeed, as you can see here. I was not sure how to interpret ****REBOOT NOW*****. When I typed reboot, it kicked an error that reboot was not a single user mode command. So, I type exit, with further woeful results. I finally had to force off power. When I rebooted, I saw what I have never seen before, the progress bar for fsck being force-run at boot.

Several further iterations of the above have not produced different results. My machine will boot, and I'm using it to post this. What you you advise?

Other possibly useful information follows.

In Disk Utility, selecting the entire device, and hitting the info button:

S.M.A.R.T. Status : Verified

____________________________________________

sudo fdisk /dev/disk0

myuser$ sudo fdisk /dev/disk0

Password:

Disk: /dev/disk0 geometry: 14593/255/63 [234441648 sectors]

Signature: 0xAA55

Starting Ending

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

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

1: EE 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 1 - 234441647] <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

myuser$

Carbon Copy Cloner or Time Machine a backup. Reboot off the Recover HD, select the troublesome volume and "erase" it (which is a reformat). Then restore from backup.

Ideally, before you do intentional destruction of your primary data, you make a 2nd backup. Obviously the instant you destroy the primary volume, your backup is no longer a backup, it's the primary source. So for a period of time you're without a backup unless you first make a 2nd backup. Especially if it's a Time Machine backup started a while ago (it has many incremental backups in it) I prefer creating a 2nd fresh Time Machine or CCC backup and using that for restore.