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Scotch_Brawth Author

Level 3

827 points

Repairing Boot Camp after creating new partition

I'm running OS X 10.8 and Windows 7 x64 Pro.

After properly setting up Boot Camp to dual-boot Windows on my Mac mini, I decided to test whether or not it was true that creating another partition (a data partition for OS X) would interfere with Boot Camp. Wikipedia claims it does interfere but without citing a source, whilst the Boot Camp documentation itself only specifies that the disk must be a single partition _prior_ to setup - there's no mention of whether the disk must be _kept_ that way afterwards.

I opened Disk Utility, reduced the size of my OS X parition from 420GB to 80GB, and created a new partition in the unallocated space. Here's how it looks now:

When I attempted to proceed with the process, I did receive a warning that doing this (and I quote), "may" cause problems with Boot Camp. Seeing as it was inconclusive, I thought I'd give it a shot - nothing ventured…

Of course, it borked Boot Camp, otherwise I wouldn't be posting here. Whilst OS X boots just fine, the Boot Camp partition now no longer shows up in the Startup Manager, though it does in the Startup Disk prefPane. If I do attempt to boot into Boot Camp, I receive the following message on a black screen:

No bootable device --- insert boot disk and press any key

The advice given to someone who had this same problem was, "fix your damaged Boot Camp volume." But I'm at a loss as to how to do that.

So, anyone know how to proceed now so that I can keep my partitions as is, whilst fully restoring normal Boot Camp functionality?

Mac mini (Mid 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.4)

Posted on Jul 26, 2012 11:28 PM

1,534 replies

ipecek

Level 1

0 points

Mar 2, 2014 10:07 AM in response to Loner T

Could you guide me through it please?

Loner T

Level 9

59,513 points

Mar 2, 2014 10:15 AM in response to ipecek

Please see this - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5105628?answerId=22253524022#22253524022

This has the exact steps.

ipecek

Level 1

0 points

Mar 2, 2014 10:25 AM in response to Loner T

So I got this and now I should see the bootcamp at the next reboot?
I am doing it over Teamviewer on my friend's macbook so it'll take some time until he comes home and restarts his mac. See you in an hour or so and thank you so much! 🙂

Loner T

Level 9

59,513 points

Mar 2, 2014 10:46 AM in response to ipecek

Please do the write command now. The Mac can be rebooted at a later time. You do not want to lose these changes, unless you are comfortable repeating these steps again.

PS: It should give you a message about needing a reboot.

Message was edited by: Loner T

ipecek

Level 1

0 points

Mar 2, 2014 11:17 AM in response to Loner T

I did that, just waiting for my friend to come back home and give me a password for the new teamviewer session so I could continue working on it.

So, after and if the bootcamp partition is working again, what should I do next to resize the partition? I assume I have a bit of unallocated space now, because I shrinked the active (OSX) partition in Disk Utility.

Nuvect

Level 1

0 points

Mar 2, 2014 11:34 AM in response to Scotch_Brawth

Hi all,

I recently migrated to a new Mac Pro from my 2008 hulk. My new Mac is running Mac OS X 10.9.2 (Build 13C64)

I used Winclone 4 to create an image of my Bootcamp drive (from a single partition on a 500GB drive) to a USB drive from which I did the restore.

In the process I discovered that Apple's Bootcamp assistant wasn't going to partition my new SSD hard drive unless I was installing Win 8. Since I neither have nor want Win 8 I used DiskUtil (this was before I found this thread of course) to equally split my partion in order to use Winclone to copy the data back to the newly made FAT partition. This seemed to work swimmingly, except that now Bless can't make the Bootcamp partition bootable and it does not show when I hold the option key down after rebooting.

Here is the obligatiory gdisk info:

[promptpro:~] prompt% sudo gpt -r -vv show disk0

gpt show: disk0: mediasize=1000555581440; sectorsize=512; blocks=1954210120

gpt show: disk0: Suspicious MBR at sector 0

gpt show: disk0: Pri GPT at sector 1

gpt show: disk0: Sec GPT at sector 1954210119

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 976265448 2 GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC

976675088 1269536 3 GPT part - 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC

977944624 2000

977946624 976263168 4 GPT part - EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7

1954209792 295

1954210087 32 Sec GPT table

1954210119 1 Sec GPT header

[promptpro:~] prompt%

[promptpro:~] prompt% sudo fdisk /dev/disk0

Disk: /dev/disk0 geometry: 121643/255/63 [1954210120 sectors]

Signature: 0xAA55

Starting Ending

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

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

1: EE 0 0 2 - 25 127 14 [ 1 - 409639] <Unknown ID>

2: AF 25 127 15 - 1023 54 11 [ 409640 - 976265448] HFS+

3: AB 1023 54 12 - 1023 60 34 [ 976675088 - 1269536] Darwin Boot

*4: 07 1023 92 19 - 1023 238 3 [ 977946624 - 976263168] HPFS/QNX/AUX

[peterdodgespro:~] pdodge%

As you can see, it looks much like everyone else's. I think that Winclone may have attempted to update the MBR? Or the GPT with the result that one or the other is corrupt. But I don't know enough to verify this is the case, nor how to repair it. I went through the thread from the begining but I didn't see how to sync/repair an MBR.

Thanks in advance for the assist.

ipecek

Level 1

0 points

Mar 2, 2014 11:59 AM in response to ipecek

Okay, Bootcamp is visible as the option when booting, but I get a message "missing operating system"
Should I now just reinstall windows over the old copy and data is safe?

Loner T

Level 9

59,513 points

Mar 2, 2014 12:40 PM in response to ipecek

You may want to use Windows Recovery console and using fixmbr and bootrec utilities.

This article from Microsoft is used very often - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392

Loner T

Level 9

59,513 points

Mar 2, 2014 12:48 PM in response to Nuvect

Nuvect wrote:

As you can see, it looks much like everyone else's. I think that Winclone may have attempted to update the MBR? Or the GPT with the result that one or the other is corrupt. But I don't know enough to verify this is the case, nor how to repair it. I went through the thread from the begining but I didn't see how to sync/repair an MBR.

You may want to look at https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5535574?answerId=23735671022#23735671022

You will need gdisk (GPT fdisk - from http://sourceforge.net/projects/gptfdisk/ ). gdisk 0.8.9 has an issue that is documented in this thread in the previous pages, but it should work for you.

ipecek

Level 1

0 points

Mar 2, 2014 12:53 PM in response to Loner T

Got the laptop beside me now.

I tried all the steps mentioned there, but it couldn't find any windows installations, although it said all the steps were sucessfuly done.
Now, there is only blinking underscore when I try to start Windows.

Nuvect

Level 1

0 points

Mar 2, 2014 1:21 PM in response to Loner T

Loner T,

I took a look at the thread you linked to. (And I'm glad that wasn't me.) It seems, from that thread you can verify whether the MBR and Primary GPT agree by looking at start and end sector values from both fdisk and gpt?

In which case, mine would seem to be in sync as they appear to agree.

So then what is the issue?

Here is gdisk's view:

[promptpro:~] prompt% sudo gdisk /dev/disk0

Password:

GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 0.8.9

Warning: Devices opened with shared lock will not have their

partition table automatically reloaded!

Partition table scan:

MBR: hybrid

BSD: not present

APM: not present

GPT: present

Found valid GPT with hybrid MBR; using GPT.

Command (? for help): p

Disk /dev/disk0: 1954210120 sectors, 931.8 GiB

Logical sector size: 512 bytes

Disk identifier (GUID): F7F74FE7-772D-47D5-9548-51DB83659D83

Partition table holds up to 128 entries

First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 1954210086

Partitions will be aligned on 8-sector boundaries

Total free space is 2301 sectors (1.1 MiB)

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

1 40 409639 200.0 MiB EF00 EFI System Partition

2 409640 976675087 465.5 GiB AF00 Customer

3 976675088 977944623 619.9 MiB AB00 Recovery HD

4 977946624 1954209791 465.5 GiB 0700 WINDOWS

Loner T

Level 9

59,513 points

Mar 2, 2014 1:26 PM in response to ipecek

You can try re-installing Windows from USB/DVD and see if that helps, in case WRC cannot fix the issue. Make sure you have a backup first, even if it is an image backup of bootcamp partition from OSX Disk Utility. Is your Bootcamp partition mounted on the OSX side and can open it in finder and see files, as expected.

Loner T

Level 9

59,513 points

Mar 2, 2014 1:38 PM in response to Nuvect

Nuvect wrote:

Here is the obligatiory gdisk info:

[promptpro:~] prompt% sudo gpt -r -vv show disk0

gpt show: disk0: mediasize=1000555581440; sectorsize=512; blocks=1954210120

gpt show: disk0: Suspicious MBR at sector 0

gpt show: disk0: Pri GPT at sector 1

gpt show: disk0: Sec GPT at sector 1954210119

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 976265448 2 GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC

976675088 1269536 3 GPT part - 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC

977944624 2000

977946624 976263168 4 GPT part - EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7

1954209792 295

1954210087 32 Sec GPT table

1954210119 1 Sec GPT header

The 2000 entry makes me question the MBR.

Can you unmount the Bootcamp partition and mount it again on the OS X side and see files in the Finder? Does Systems Preferences show Bootcamp at all in Startup Disk?

Nuvect

Level 1

0 points

Mar 2, 2014 1:39 PM in response to Loner T

Loner T wrote:

You can try re-installing Windows from USB/DVD and see if that helps, in case WRC cannot fix the issue. Make sure you have a backup first, even if it is an image backup of bootcamp partition from OSX Disk Utility. Is your Bootcamp partition mounted on the OSX side and can open it in finder and see files, as expected.

Unfortunately, I can't re-install windows. Bootcamp assistant won't let me use anything but Win 8 and I don't have that. Meanwhile, I can't boot into Windows to do anything.

Yes, The bootcamp partition mounts fine on the OS X desktop and I can see files on it. Note that Diskutil seems happy with it:

[promptpro:~] prompt% diskutil list /dev/disk0

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk0

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1

2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 499.8 GB disk0s2

3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3

4: Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP 499.8 GB disk0s4

[promptpro:~] prompt% diskutil info /dev/disk0s4

Device Identifier: disk0s4

Device Node: /dev/disk0s4

Part of Whole: disk0

Device / Media Name: WINDOWS

Volume Name: BOOTCAMP

Escaped with Unicode: BOOTCAMP

Mounted: Yes

Mount Point: /Volumes/BOOTCAMP

Escaped with Unicode: /Volumes/BOOTCAMP

File System Personality: NTFS

Type (Bundle): ntfs

Name (User Visible): Windows NT File System (NTFS)

Partition Type: Microsoft Basic Data

OS Can Be Installed: No

Media Type: Generic

Protocol: PCI

SMART Status: Verified

Volume UUID: 0D65D47A-F403-460E-87F1-A921973925B9

Total Size: 499.8 GB (499846742016 Bytes) (exactly 976263168 512-Byte-Units)

Volume Free Space: 119.4 GB (119357149184 Bytes) (exactly 233119432 512-Byte-Units)

Device Block Size: 512 Bytes

Read-Only Media: No

Read-Only Volume: Yes

Ejectable: No

Whole: No

Internal: Yes

Solid State: Yes

Loner T

Level 9

59,513 points

Mar 2, 2014 1:44 PM in response to Nuvect

Nuvect wrote:

Loner T wrote:

You can try re-installing Windows from USB/DVD and see if that helps, in case WRC cannot fix the issue. Make sure you have a backup first, even if it is an image backup of bootcamp partition from OSX Disk Utility. Is your Bootcamp partition mounted on the OSX side and can open it in finder and see files, as expected.

Unfortunately, I can't re-install windows. Bootcamp assistant won't let me use anything but Win 8 and I don't have that. Meanwhile, I can't boot into Windows to do anything.

That was to "ipecek". 😉

Nuvect wrote:

Yes, The bootcamp partition mounts fine on the OS X desktop and I can see files on it. Note that Diskutil seems happy with it:

Our posts crossed.

Repairing Boot Camp after creating new partition