Repairing Boot Camp after creating new partition

staycoldb wrote:

so I can just boot to the recovery partition and reformat that way?

A recent Time Capsule backup would be even better.

Good point Loner T 🙂

So normally in these situations the only official way to deal with this is to format the drive and re-install everything.

Obviously OSX still boots but I'm assuming that disk utility will refuse to allow you to delete the Bootcamp partition.

Therein lies the problem.

Have a go at that first.

If it doesn't there may be a way to delete the partition with gdisk and to create a new protective MBR.

This may fool OSX into thinking that there was never a Windows installation and it may then allow you to stretch the Macintosh HD back to the full size of the disk again.

Thereby allowing you to start again.

As I say this is not official and I haven't tried it before but it may work.

Thanks for all the help guys. I don't really care about losing OSX because I haven't done much in it. But I spent 3 days configuring windows so I'm not excited about losing that at all.

So, you guys think my best option is to just go ahead and reformat?

See what Loner T thinks too, but I think it's likely that Windows is gone already.

As you're thinking of reformatting anyway I'd try gdisk first. It would save some time if OSX doesn't need re-installing. But the decision is yours.

(But I'd love to know if my idea works or not 🙂)

Another thing: I've got some movies on this hdd I want to back up before I reformat. I was trying to transfer them over to another hdd I have plugged into a usb port with an adapter but it wont let me drag and drop the movies over. Is this because the file system of the other hdd is ntfs?

From inside OSX? Does copy/paste work?

Nope. It's weird. I don't know why it won't let me copy and paste the movies over. No big deal though.

The OSX NTFS drivers are read-only. If the source and target are both NTFS, you will not be able to move files between the two using OSX Finder.

Ya, I reformatted the drive to fat32 and was able to transfer everything over. Time to reformat now I guess 😟 Thanks guys for all your advice

I am not sure if a Windows 7/8 DVD can be used to boot/repair the Bootcamp partition, but that may be something to consider, before you start all over again.

GPT: 2 409640 80005903 38.0 GiB AF00 Macintosh HD

MBR: AF 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 409640 - 79596264] HFS+

These do not agree.

Look again. gdisk reports start and end LBA. fdisk and gpt commands report start LBA and size (not end). If you add fdisk/gpt start and size minus 1 you will get the end LBA which should match gdisk's end value.

What's probably happened here is the resize of the Windows volume stomped on the backup GPT at the end of the disk, which is why the gpt command flaked out, and why gdisk reported the backup GPT was damaged. The MBR #4 entry for Windows is probably correct because the Windows resize utility would have only updated the MBR and only the Windows entry in it. But yes it's weird that it starts at 204806144; I'll guess that the resize utility actually did a resize (shrink) and then moved the resulting volume farther back, ostensibly to make room in front of the Windows partition to grow the OS X volume?

If the GPT is repaired, that will probably cause the tail end of the Windows NTFS volume to be stepped on, just like the reverse happpened in the resize. The NTFS volume might survive but technically it's broken. So in any case this Windows volume really ought to just be nuked and start over and not use Windows resize utilities on Boot Camp'd Macs.

Realize FAT32 has a file size limit of 2GB. So anything bigger than that is truncated. I forget if OS X warns of this or if the failure to correctly copy is silent.

I haven't read the whole thread but if the GPT has not been repaired yet, then it's possible the NTFS volume is still intact. I don't know why after resizing it wasn't bootable - buggy resize utility? No idea. But if it didn't totally bungle the job, then Windows Startup Repair should fix this. Just don't fix the GPT. It's enough to get Windows booted, and then you can do a backup of that state - I think the Windows included backup utility can do something like this, maybe it only backsup user data. But that might be useful. Another possibility is Winclone which ought to be able to clone the whole thing. The next step would be to lie like a dog, by telling gdisk to make a new hybrid MBR. That way Boot Camp Assistant can hopefully be tricked into thinking that 4th partition is a legit Boot Camp volume and properly delete it. Then you can use Boot Camp Assistant to split your OS X volume yet again to the size you really want, and then use Winclone to restore - it's capable of taking a bigger or smaller source and making it fit into a different sized destination partition.

Maybe Camptune can do this also, but I think it's just a resizing utility, not a cloning utility. And FYI there's an ancient free version of Winclone floating around, that's not what you want. You need to use the current version which is not free but I don't think it's expensive.

Well, I popped in the win7 install disc and booted to it, opened a cmd prompt and repaired then rebuilt the mbr. Now isntead of the "disk read error" problem, all I have is the black screen and white cursor. Any ideas?

Boot again, get to a command prompt and run chkdsk on the Windows volume (probably C: drive) without options. With no options it won't fix problems, just report them. I'm curious if it finds a valid volume at all and if it does then you can move on to bootrec.exe.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392

ehh, I already did bootrec with no luck. I'm reformatting the drive now as we speak. Was just spinning my wheels trying to repair the bootcamp partition. Figured I'd just reinstall it and get it over with. Thanks anyway.