Repairing Boot Camp after creating new partition

SMART Status itself is next to useless. You need to copy past everything below that. As for the fdisk result, it indicates your MBR is a protective MBR, which is normal if you don't have Windows installed using Boot Camp.

And just to be clear about what you're erasing, again you're erasing a volume (reformatting a partition). You're not blowing away the whole disk. So make sure you select the correct thing.

There was nothing below the line I posted. I enabled Debug menu in Disk Utility, but that did not increase the harvest of information.

Re the fdisk result, what do you mean by

your MBR is a protective MBR, which is normal if you don't have Windows installed using Boot Camp.

I have two internal drives. One, the SSD, is the book drive with no unusual other volumes, and it is GUID, or so I thought.

myuser$ diskutil list

/dev/disk0

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *120.0 GB disk0

1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1

2: Apple_HFS Contino92 119.0 GB disk0s2

3: Apple_Boot RecoverySSD 784.2 MB disk0s3

I will begin to make backups. Should I do one forensic one using dd as you already showed me, or just stay booted and do two with CCC? If I remember right I boot to single user to use dd with a target in ***.iso format.

boot drive, not book drive

Normally the only reason to inspect the MBR with fdisk on a Mac is if you're using Boot Camp. That doesn't appear to be the case, yet this is a Boot Camp thread so... it's confusing to provide the fdisk result.

If you have the space for it, there's nothing wrong with a dd copy, but that copy will take all of the file system problems with it. So it's not suitable for restoring information. Either CCC or Time Machine will log errors. CCC has its own log to record errors if some files can't be copied. Time Machine errors are found in the Console application, filter with backupd.

And yes for dd it should be either single user mode (read only file system).

Sorry to have been confusing. I saw that you had asked the fellow above me for the output of those two commands, so to speak, so I offered it as well, without really understanding why. Should I have started a new thread?

Yes. Obviously I wouldn't have seen it so if you're trying to get my attention it's worth posting a link in this **** thread with a 1-2 line summary and maybe I'd poke my head in. Too late now, you have a plan to follow.

So, assuming that my boot SSD is /dev/disk0, then I would be erasing slice two or /dev/disk0s2, yes?

The second backup is running right now. I will sleep then wake up. When I wake up I will erase that slice Where now resides my apparently badly corrupted installation of data and Mountain Lion. Then, I presume I will restore or reinstall Mountain lion to that slice, and and then somehow try to restore as much that is good from my backups and the minimum amount that is bad? Do I have the general idea?

I would be erasing slice two or /dev/disk0s2, yes?

Well yeah but in Disk Utility it will be the name of your OS X volume.

I presume I will restore or reinstall Mountain lion to that slice, and and then somehow try to restore as much that is good from my backups and the minimum amount that is bad? Do I have the general idea?

Hard to say if anything is corrupt and the backup is also corrupt. If there are no errors, it's probably OK. Ideally you'd reinstall Mountain Lion, and update it, then do the restore data only from Time machine. But often that's a PITA to get all settings back to normal. It's easier to just restore the full backup, take a chance. If there's weirdness that tossing preferences doesn't fix, then you can do a "clean" install of the system.

I got no errors using CCC to make either backup.

I have a "utility" boot volume that is "better" than Recovery HD in the sense that I can run CCC or DiskWarrior from it, in addition to the limted set of tools in Recovery HD.

Unless you advise me to boot from Recovery HD, I'll boot from the other volume, erase my current boot volume but not repartition or reformat the whole disk and all its slices. I suppose one would use the restore function from DiskUtility on Recovery HD if using that approach to restore the backup.

Christopher:

I posted the data you reqested. I still have a bootcamp I can't boot into. Is there anything I can do to salvage it?

Whatever you used to create the backup is what I'd use to do the restore. Disk Utility uses asr behind the scene and I think can restore from any file based backup (like a .dmg, .iso, .img file).

When I booted from my utility, I could not erase the boot volume with twisted infrastructure. I booted to Recovery HD, erased and erased again the former boot volume, mounted the read-only backup, and restored it to the boot volume with ASR. ASR restored by blocks, or so it said. I used USB3, and the 92GB backup restored to the SSD and verified in 27 minutes. ⚠

I could have rebooted into the utility and used CCC to restore, but this seems to have worked.

After boot, Google Drive burped unpleasantly, but I've got TRIM enabled, and have successfully run all the suggested variants of fsck from single user mode, without issue.

Are there any further tests or proofs of integrity you would suggest?

Thank you again!

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

This entry for the MBR is wrong and needs to be fixed. The easiest way is to use fdisk in interactive editing mode. Interactive means you get an fdisk prompt, and commands and data entry are done by typing a single letter or number followed by return.

sudo fdisk -e /dev/disk0

p [shows the partition listing]

setpid 4 [set partition type code on partition 4]

07 [NTFS code]

flag 4 [set partition 4 as bootable]

write [write changes to disk]

exit

And now you should reboot.