Repairing Boot Camp after creating new partition

Yeah I figured it wouldn't be too easy to do considering most people don't have a need for two Windows OS's on one machine. I'm going to look into the Windows 8 bootloader though because it would make sense for it to know how to boot Win7.

As for the fdisk command, would that just change the bootable flag without having to create a new hybrid MBR each time?

fdisk is an MBR editor, so it edits the (hybrid) MBR that you already have. Fortunately the boot flag feature in fdisk is a toggle, so you just toggle a partition, write the change to disk, and then reboot. You don't have to enter in all of the information: partition#, ID, start sector, size, like you do when editing a partition.

Just realise that when you add only GPT partitions 4 and 5 to the MBR, they become MBR partitions 2 and 3. So your choices will be to "flag 3" or to "flag 4" to set the flag. I just tested this and in fact only one partition can be set at a time. When I "flag 3" now partition 3 is marked bootable, and when I "flag 4" now partition 3 is not flag but partition 4 is.

Oh and when I said fdisk, I mean literally fdisk. Not "GPT fdisk" a.k.a. gdisk, which is a GPT partition editor.

Ok, I understand. I'm going to keep looking into the Windows 8 Bootloader option but I think I might even be able to write a script that performs fdisk for me. Anyway, thanks so much! I really appreciate it!

Hi, thanks for your reply.

That's where I shrank the hfs+ partition so I could enlarge boot camp.

When I press option, I am presented with 3 choices, one for rEFIt and two for windows. I'm uncertain why I see two, but it's been that way for a while (possibly from when I moved it from the ssd many months ago). One option says no operating system, and the other produces the rapid flashing cursor in the upper left.

Whenever the Mac firmware finds a disk with all three things true: a.) with boot code in the MBR; b.) a hybrid MBR; c.) one of the MBR partitions, except the first, is flagged bootable, you will get a Windows disk icon. The firmware hard codes the icon's name for Windows, it doesn't matter what the operating system actually is.

Did you want to keep the two Windows options on disk0s2 and disk2s3?

You said you used gparted to try and resize the NTFS partition ( disk2s3) to take up the free space in front of it. What did gparted tell you? Here's the thing, you can't merely resize NTFS forward, you have to move it, then resize. Both NTFS and JHFS+ resize from the end of the volume, they won't resize on their own from the front.

Gparted has an option to move/resize. You have to tell it to move the front of the partition to consum the free space in front. You did this? And did you get any error messages? Gparted does not support hybrid MBRs. Chances are the hybrid MBR will be wiped out, that yours is intact suggests that gparted didn't actually do anything, yet it's not bootable.

Another thing is that the vast majority of Apple computers don't support CSM-BIOS booting from USB. So this disk2s3 that contains the Boot Camp volume you're trying to resize and boot from, this is in a USB enclosure? What model Macbook Pro?

That's understandable regarding the icons. Strangely with rEFIt, I've noticed 2 different windows icons though...there's the grey one and then a color newer style.

This is on a late 2008 unibody macbook. (I've gotten used to referring to it as a mbp from a parts perspective) I've removed the superdrive and moved my 500gb seagate in it's place, then put a 128gb samsung ssd in the main bay. And I did not reformat the seagate before moving it....it remained a bootable drive for some tiime. Eventuall I did some cleaning by simply removing most all of the stuff I didn't need, still never wiping and starting from scratch. There are few directories (download, documents, itunes, etc) linked to my home on the ssd, but is otherwise fairly separate from the ssd in the main bay. 128gb started to little to cramped and since at the time I was barely using windows I moved it over to the seagate residing in the old superdrive slot.

So back to now...after reading for over a day on this I had gotten to the point where I decided to be a little risky and I used gdisk just like you lined out for the op, substituting the correct drives of course. That's why everything is matching up. Before, I had suspicious MBR and there was no boot flag.

Oh, and disk0s2 is a new SSD that's in the superdrive slot. After this debacle, I decided to be done with it and dedicate windows to it's own disk. So what you see as disk2s3 is what used to be in the superdrive bay. Up until just earlier today that's where it was. So the new ssd is all ready to install windows, but I would MUCH prefer to somehow restore windows that's still on the seagate drive.

I guess I should've put more of this down in the beginning but my posts was already feeling a bit long winded....as is this one, lol.

Thanks again

At this point I have no idea what your question or problem is. And I am confused on the state of the drives in the computer and where you want to go from here.

Sorry about that!

Okay, what I want to do is place my old boot camp onto a new, dedicated ssd. I know I can do this *if* I could get the old boot camp partition to boot. What I don't know is if this is also possible with it in its current, non-booting condition (i.e. moving everything over to a newly formatted partition).

You can't move the Boot Camp partition easily, and it is less likely that it will boot if you succeed. Back it up (Windows Backup) and restore to a new installation.

You can try using a recent version of Winclone and see if that works. But since the current Boot Camp volume is broken in some way, it's unclear if Winclone will figure it out and fix it in the process (it has some limited ability to restore the bootloader and maybe the BCD as well). But if you already have one copy still on this original SSD before you copied it to the rust drive, you might consider Wincloning that one rather than the one on the 500GB Seagate which is in an unknown state.

Windows Backup should work if the destination disk is exclusively MBR. If you use Windows Backup to restore to a Boot Camp partition on a disk that also includes Mac OS, it will cause big problems, probably data loss. And the reason why is because it's GPT unaware, making it fair game for both the primary and alternate GPTs to be stepped on (and I've seen this happen). So dual booters should avoid Windows Backup in my opinion, because while you can backup safely, you have a limited ability to restore (you'd have to restore to a dedicated disk).

The only copy that exists is on the Seagate. Way back when, as soon as I had tested everything was ok on the Seagate I removed the original that was on the SSD. I have the newest Winclone, and I've received 2 errors: 1st was that there was no MBR and it didn't even start. 2nd was after running gdisk, it seemed like it was working then when it got to the end it failed.

The new ssd that I just bought IS going to be a dedicated disk.

Question for you Chris, I thought that Windows Backup (not System Image) was a file level system, how would that cause changes to the partition?

Have you tried running Windows Startup Repair on the Seagate?

Oops. I think you're right. Windows Backups just backs up user files, right? The idea isn't to restore to a blank partition but to a freshly installed/updated copy of Windows, right? If so I was definitely confusing it with something else. File copy/backup/restore is safe.

It's when the MBR is modified that things go wrong, because it makes it out of sync with the GPT, and typically causes the alternate GPT to get stepped on (corrupt), and the primary GPT is rendered invalid. A prime example of this is using Windows tools to resize a Windows volume. Not a good idea.