Repairing Boot Camp after creating new partition

@jupe699

You have four disks attached, three of which are Windows volumes, and it's non-obvious what you want to do.

@c_jones

Apple doesn't support what you want to do. A five partition disk cannot have a hybrid MBR produced for it, by Apple's tools. (You say three partition but it's actually five, if you look at your gpt results: EFI System partition, Mac OS, Recovery HD, and two Windows partitions.) Without a hybrid MBR, Windows will not boot on Apple hardware (unless you find the EFI hacks to get it to boot native EFI instead of with the CSM).

Further, having two disks with Windows on it seems difficult: Apple's CSM (legacy BIOS) blindly loads bootloader code from the first available disk it finds, and there is no BIOS setup UI like on real PC's to choose a boot disk.

I don't understand why you have so many partitions anyway, they seem to be unnecessary, and causing you more difficulty.

i'm sorry i think i pasted info from an external drive as well.

let me re-paste the information

host-178-21-55-151:~ jupe69$ sudo gpt -r -vv show disk0

WARNING: Improper use of the sudo command could lead to data loss

or the deletion of important system files. Please double-check your

typing when using sudo. Type "man sudo" for more information.

To proceed, enter your password, or type Ctrl-C to abort.

Password:

gpt show: disk0: mediasize=1000204886016; sectorsize=512; blocks=1953525168

gpt show: disk0: Suspicious MBR at sector 0

gpt show: disk0: Pri GPT at sector 1

gpt show: disk0: Sec GPT at sector 1953525167

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 1462890624 2 GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC

1463300264 1269544 3 GPT part - 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC

1464569808 48

1464569856 488953856 4 GPT part - EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7

1953523712 1423

1953525135 32 Sec GPT table

1953525167 1 Sec GPT header

host-178-21-55-151:~ jupe69$ sudo fdisk /dev/disk0

Disk: /dev/disk0 geometry: 121601/255/63 [1953525168 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 - 1462890624] HFS+

3: AB 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [1463300264 - 1269544] Darwin Boot

4: 0B 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [1464569856 - 488953856] Win95 FAT-32

this is what i can see. I have tried numerous times to install windows 7 again. Every time i run bootcamp and it creates the partition after restart i get the No bootable device error. If you have any idea what might be going on i would really appreciate it. Also if you need any other information i would gladly provide it.

Thanks for your time.

@jupe699

The external devices matter. The Boot Camp instructions make it clear you can't have multiple disks connected when doing using Boot Camp or when installing Windows. Disconnect all of the external disks and try again.

The other thing you can answer is if any of your external disks also have Windows installed? Or if you attempted to install Windows on an external disk?

People who do this have all sorts of problems like what you're describing, although some people manage to get multiple installations of Windows on multiple disks to work. I don't know how because I haven't been able to reproduce a working multiple Windows install, due to limitations with Apple hardware which does not have a configurable BIOS setup with which to choose a specific boot disk. Apple hardware blindly loads the first Windows bootloader it finds, which might be an internal disk (usually the case) but might pick a broken external bootloader and cause the error you're encountering.

Hi,

yes i have tried it without the external disks connected. Also they don't have an OS on them at all. It's just time machine and storage.

I am trying to install windows from an external dvd though. My superdrive is not reading dvd's any more, only empty DVD+R. I don't know if this has anything to do with it. As far as i know this is the only difference since i last successfully installed win7 and the fact that i was on Snow Leopard.

Christopher,

Thank you very much for your response, I really appreciate your input on this. You are like the man on this boot, mbr items. I actually have to work in windows or my job and mac for other things so I need windows 7 and mac osx. When adding a SSD drive I freed up room on my prumary HD. So I got a little nutty and thought it would be nice to have a win8 installation to start working with as well (for work), and also it would be nice to have a partition "drive" that all three operating systems could access to share files. hence the "STORAGE" drive in ms-dos format. then there are the system created partitions so yes it does end up being 5 partitions. I know it is a bit extreme but I would have liked to have it work, but it looks like I just need to drop the win8 and storage drive and have that space reclaimed by osx. So thats the why, is there any hope? if not would it be difficult to remove the bootcamp8 and storage partitions and have that reclaimed by osx?

thanks again.

@jupe699

So the problem your'e having is booting from the Window DVD? Have you tried burning a DVD-R instead of DVD+R? There's a big difference between the two. Another thing to consider is making a USB boot stick if you have a new enough model Mac that Boot Camp Assistant presents you with the option to make USB bootable media.

I don't know if the problem is due to the fact that i try to install windows from an external dvd. The external one works fine though in OS X. Tried all types of discs. Also tried with the usb stick and i still get the same message. No bootable device.

@C_Jones

The problem is that the instant you go off the rails that Apple has provided, you have to know a lot of crazy details about MBR, GPT, various ways to make "valid" hybrid MBRs (in that none are truly valid or standard) as well as how EFI and CSM (legacy BIOS) behave. Bootloading is complicated with lots of interaction between the various details. Apple makes it far less complicated via restrictions. By rejecting just one of their restrictions, you've opened about 90 cans of worms.

So presumably you're referring to disk1 which has 5 partitions, two of which are Windows, and what you want to do is blow away the two Windows partitions and reclaim the space for Mac OS X. Is that correct?

@jupe699

Apple's computers have limited support for booting Windows from external sources. The boot camp guide is clear about the external dvd player needing "compatible external optical drive" and "For information on using your computer with an external optical drive, see the documentation that came with your computer. "

Thanks, so i take it everything looks good on my partitions and stuff. I just have somehow to replace my superdrive then. I just wanted to make sure that's the issue so that i don't replace it and still not working. Also the usb stick not booting up made me suspicious and i thought it might have something to do with the disk.

I'm not familiar with the various models of Apple computers that support booting via USB sticks or external drives. So you could get a new external drive and still not be able to boot. Some models only boot from an internal optical drive. My Macbook Pro 4,1 from 2008 is one such computer.

The partitions look reasonable.

If you have previously had Windows installed on this internal disk (no externals connected), you could try zeroing the internal disk MBR bootloader area with the following command. You have to make sure you get the entire command on a single line before you hit enter, if you truncate the limiting commands at the end it will absolutely proceed to zero your entire harddrive without asking you for additional permission:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk0 bs=440 count=1

Great, two last questtions.

is this safe to do? Will i lose any data?

and secondly, i tried to get into the recovery. I saw there that disk utility doesn't see the hidden recovery partition. It showed before i split it with boot camp, that my only partition was 935GB (the rest was for the recovery, although i couldn't see it). So my second question is, if i reformat it from there, i will lose the ability to proceed with the recovery i guess, right?

If you get the command correct, with the 440 byte block size and single count limiter, it will only zero 440 bytes of data on the drive, which is the bootloader code region of the MBR. If you get it wrong, yes you'll lose a lot of data. If you don't have good backups, then you're taking a HUGE risk just by using a computer, let alone higher risk activities like using Boot Camp Assistant and Windows on your computer.

Recovery HD has a partition type GUID for Apple Boot, rather than Mac OS X Extended. So Disk Utility and the Finder always hide it and do not mount it by default. I don't understand your question: if you reformat what? Proceed with what recovery? What does Recovery HD have to do with anything you've brought up so far?

i was thinking if none of it works, maybe try to do it like when i had Snow Leopard, where the disk was 1 partition only, without any secret partitions (recovery). So i was thinking to go into recovery, reformat it as 1TB (instead of 935GB) that can see it now and proceed from there. I just don't know if it will work and download OS X from the internet or it will break. 🙂