Unable to boot up in bootcamp after installing Mountain Lion

Hi,

I've installed Mountain Lion on 2 Macs, which distroyed bootcamp only on one MacBookPro (2008), everything runs fine on my iMac.

I can see the Windows partition when rebooting with Alt key, (and I can read data from the windows partition) but nothing happens when I select it; and it resets and boots Mac OS X after a while. Parallels, using bootcamp partition as well, cannot start.

What shall I do? I have no important data on my Windows partition, so I could start over completely. But I only have Windows XP, and I read that this won't work anymore with Mountain Lion.

Any suggestion to get fast and easy to a newly working Windows bootcamp partition, without to install everything again? Does the method proposed by Christopher Murphy work also in this case?

Many thanks,

Matthias

Boot from a Windows install disk, and run Windows Startup Repair.

I recently upgraded from 10.7 to 10.8. After upgrading I was no longer able to boot into Windows 7.

The only change I made so far is to make the Windows Partition bootable by following one of Christopher's instructions.

I can now see the option of booting into Windows 7, but when I do I get "missing operating system".

I tried using the Windows 7 "repair" option (startup repair), with no success. So I'm guessing it has something to do with the GUID/MBR/Identifier of the partition.

I tried booting up with a Windows Utility Disk ( HawkPE ), used Norton Ghost to backup the partition to another drive, then wrote that image to yet another drive, but Windows 7 just sees it as an empty drive (healthy primary partition) that I can't mount/assign a drive letter to.

I have some important work documents on there that I need... Any help would be greatly appreciated.

INFO:

MacMini02s-Mac-mini:~ macmini02$ sudo gpt -r -vv show disk0

gpt show: disk0: mediasize=500107862016; sectorsize=512; blocks=976773168

gpt show: disk0: Suspicious MBR at sector 0

gpt show: disk0: Pri GPT at sector 1

gpt show: disk0: Sec GPT at sector 976773167

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 192089832 2 GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC

192499472 1269536 3 GPT part - 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC

193769008 1270224

195039232 781733888 4 GPT part - EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7

976773120 15

976773135 32 Sec GPT table

976773167 1 Sec GPT header

MacMini02s-Mac-mini:~ macmini02$ sudo fdisk /dev/disk0

Disk: /dev/disk0 geometry: 60801/255/63 [976773168 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 - 192089832] HFS+

3: AB 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 192499472 - 1269536] Darwin Boot

*4: 0C 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 195039232 - 781733888] Win95 FAT32L

MacMini02s-Mac-mini:~ macmini02$ sudo diskutil list /dev/disk0

/dev/disk0

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *500.1 GB disk0

1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1

2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 98.3 GB disk0s2

3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3

4: Microsoft Basic Data 400.2 GB disk0s4

command (? for help): p

Disk /dev/disk0: 976773168 sectors, 465.8 GiB

Logical sector size: 512 bytes

Disk identifier (GUID): E834CE05-BF7E-4596-855A-40BE1BDF454A

Partition table holds up to 128 entries

First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 976773134

Partitions will be aligned on 8-sector boundaries

Total free space is 1270245 sectors (620.2 MiB)

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

1 40 409639 200.0 MiB EF00 EFI System Partition

2 409640 192499471 91.6 GiB AF00 Customer

3 192499472 193769007 619.9 MiB AB00 Recovery HD

4 195039232 976773119 372.8 GiB 0700 BOOTCAMP

Check out my post on page 4. I used Winclone http://twocanoes.com/winclone/ ($20) and iPartition http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iPartition.php ($47) to get mine working. Yeah I know that is $67 out of pocket to fix an issue but you have to figure out what your data is worth to you. Mine was worth it. Its still booting to the Bootcamp correctly and I've had no issues since these two programs were used. I also use Quickboot to switch from Mac OS to Windows. It worked for me, it just might work for the rest of you who are having issues with Mountain Lion.

The only problem I'm seeing is the MBR contains the wrong partition type for Windows. It's set to 0C but should be 07. I'm doubtful this would prevent Windows from booting. But it's easy to create a new hybrid MBR with gdisk which will create a hybrid MBR with the correct partition type. Add partitions 2 3 4 and make only 4 bootable.

Technically even this should allow the Windows volume to be readable from within OS X to get your documents even if it's not bootable. If its not bootable and won't mount in OS X then there is some other problem. I'd start with a Windows install disk, and seeing if chkdsk /f on the volume finds/repairs a valid NTFS volume. If not, I'm out of ideas.

Many thanks, after booting from Windows, suddenly everything came back, without doing anything special😕

Matthias

Thanks Christopher, I was hoping it would be that easy.

I'll look at some of the previous posts and the gdisk documentation for the step-by-step as I know you've covered this many, many times.

The solution is the simplest!

I looked at answers all over the support community and felt sleepy or giddy each time I went through a thread finding a solution regarding the issue of the Windows partition missing or disappeared in the 'Startup Disk' option. I just did 5 minutes of tinkering on my own and solved this year old bugging problem ever since Lion was released and installed on my MacBook Pro.

The solution is as follows:

1. Boot in OSX

2. Open Disk Utility

3. Select the Boot Camp (Windows) Partition and click 'Unmount'.

4. Wait 10 seconds, pray, and click on 'Mount' again.

Open the "Startup Disk' option in the system prefs......SOLVED!!

I got Mountain Lion with Windows 7 64-bit loaded.

Hey do I get a free MacBook 15" with Retina Display for this?? 🙂 🙂

Hello Christopher:

I think I have a similar issue than the ones you have resolved so hopefully you'll be able to pinpoint my issue real quick!! and I'd highly appreciate your help.

This is what I did:

a) Created a Win 7 bootcamp partition

b) Installed Windows 8

c) Installed VMware

2 Issues:

1.- Although I'm perfectly able to run Win8 as a VM ONLY, If I try to boot my Mac computer with Win8, it doesn't load and crashes (get like a blue death screen)

2.- I'm unable to get Winclone to backup my bootcamp partition since Mac sees bootcamp partition as "FAT" partition, even though it's reported as NTFS in Windows. I do recall I installed rEFIT and tried to use its utilities this but never fixed this so I deleted rEFIT. This issue is more important than the first one.

Pls take a look at my stuff:

GPT

gpt show: disk0: mediasize=251000193024; sectorsize=512; blocks=490234752

gpt show: disk0: Suspicious MBR at sector 0

gpt show: disk0: Pri GPT at sector 1

gpt show: disk0: Sec GPT at sector 490234751

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 390624992 2 GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC

391034632 262392

391297024 98936832 3 GPT part - EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7

490233856 863

490234719 32 Sec GPT table

490234751 1 Sec GPT header

MBR STUFF

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 - 390624992] HFS+

3: 0B 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 391297024 - 98936832] Win95 FAT-32

4: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused

DISKUTIL STUFF:

/dev/disk0

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *251.0 GB disk0

1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1

2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 200.0 GB disk0s2

3: Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP 50.7 GB disk0s3

**************************

What do you recommend that I do? :-( I'd highly appreciate your help!

Thanks!

-Ed

I don't know what set the MBR partition #3 to type 0B but that might be why the Mac sees it as FAT and Windows sees it as NTFS. The proper code is 07. You can change this with fdisk. Something like this should work:

sudo fdisk -e /dev/diskX

Then use the setpid command and follow the steps to change the type of the 3rd partition to 07. Then write out the modified partition table. Per usual, make recent backups in case there's a mistake in the directions or in following them.