iMac 13,2 Late 2012 3TB Boot Camp Windows 7 Install - SOLVED! (unsupported)

Not going to bother posting to your other thread.

If for any reason your Boot Camp Windows Partition got hosed it is Gone with no recovery. Sorry that is just the way it is on a Mac and Boot Camp.

You can't boot a Mac from a Windows Recovery DVD or thumb drive. You can boot a Mac from a Windows DVD without using the Boot Camp Assistant program to first set the system up to do that. Since you can not Mount the partition in OS X there is no way to access it, even IF you have a Program on OS X to write to NTFS formatted partitions. Which is not need for OS X to Read NTFS formatted partitions.

The time to think about backups is Way before you ever have a problem.

About the onlyu thing you could try is to take the drive out of the Mac and connect it to a Windows PC and see if the PC can see and access the Windows partition. Which I doubt.

Good Luck & Best Wishes.

P.S.

You might consider buying a Real Windows PC if you are going to do most of your computing on Windows. It would save you a Lot of headaches.

HankSRQ wrote:

Could you please look at https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4813277 to see if you can help with bootcamp problem?

If for any reason your Boot Camp Windows Partition got hosed it is Gone with no recovery.

This is untrue, and fairly incoherent as well.

You can't boot a Mac from a Windows Recovery DVD or thumb drive. You can boot a Mac from a Windows DVD without using the Boot Camp Assistant program to first set the system up to do that. Since you can not Mount the partition in OS X there is no way to access it, even IF you have a Program on OS X to write to NTFS formatted partitions. Which is not need for OS X to Read NTFS formatted partitions.

If you bothered to read the other thread, he fixed the problem with Windows Startup Repair from the install DVD. Simple.

The time to think about backups is Way before you ever have a problem.

True.

You might consider buying a Real Windows PC if you are going to do most of your computing on Windows. It would save you a Lot of headaches.

Separate Windows hardware for games. Virtual Machine on OS X for everything else.

10.8.3 now supports Bootcamp on a 3tb drive. If you followed the above steps and deleted your logical volume, you will not be able to run Bootcamp (even if you repartition the drive as one partition and format using disk utility!).

You must, it seems, do as follows:

1.) Backup all your stuff. The following steps will erase the contents of your hard drive.

2.) Reboot to a recovery USB stick. Open the terminal.

3.) Run 'diskutil cs create "Logical Volume Group" /dev/disk0' (assuming that your main drive is disk0)

4.) Wait for the command to end, it will output a UUID.

5.) Run 'diskutil cs createVolume <UUID> jhfs+ "Macintosh HD" 100%'

6.) Exit the terminal and re-install OS X. Do not restore from Time Machine - this will blow away your logical volume.

7.) Run bootcamp.

8.) Migrate your stuff back from Time Machine (or whatever backup solution you use).

Presumeably, steps 7 and 8 are interchangeable. I should confess that I'm currently on step 7, but I do believe it will be clear sailing from here.

Yep, works, with 10.8.3 recreating the logical volume and re-installing OS X will let you install windows via bootcamp (if you followed my original hack).