You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

ThBo Author

Level 1

8 points

Windows doesn't start anymore after re-adding disk

Im running OSX 10.8.3 on a mid 2012 Macbook Pro.

I tried to install Windows 8 Pro with bootcamp and initially i ran into the problem that the Win Setup did not accept the bootcamp partition for installation because it is not on the first disk of the system. I have a SSD (disk0) with MacOSX and a HDD (disk1) with some data which i partioned with bootcamp to also hold the bootcamp partition.

After some research i figured i have to temporarily detach the SSD from the system to allow Windows to install in the bootcamp partition. I did this and it worked perfectly. After making sure that Windows is installed correctly and booting without a problem i reattached the SSD and that is where things went bad.

Now when i choose windows as startup device i get the "No bootable device --- insert boot disk and press any key" error.

There is another very long thread in this forum which solves a similar problem (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4144252?start=0&tstart=0).

But in that case the problem was that someone added another partition on the same disk which lead to 5 partitions on one disk. That is not my problem since i have only 2 (4 counting the hidden ones).

That is why i am hesitating to do the heavy MBR tweaking suggested in the other thread. I think it is probably not necessary and i would mess it up for sure...

Below the info diskutil gives me for reference

/dev/disk0

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *128.0 GB disk0

1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1

2: Apple_HFS Macintosh SSD 127.0 GB disk0s2

3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 700.0 MB disk0s3

/dev/disk1

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *750.2 GB disk1

1: EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1

2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 621.8 GB disk1s2

3: Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP 128.0 GB disk1s3

Macbook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Mar 26, 2013 6:37 AM

20 replies

Mar 26, 2013 4:44 PM in response to ThBo

Before doing anything else, you might try just doing a

chkdsk

And then if that comes up without any major issues, then do

chkdsk /f

ThBo Author

Level 1

8 points

Mar 26, 2013 4:54 PM in response to Christopher Murphy

I did the chkdsk in the afternoon. No error.

The bcd export returns "device not found" (im paraphrasing since my system is german)

Changed the attributes of the bcd file. Renamed it.

The rebuildbcd bootrec command returns the same error: "device not found" even though it did find a windows installation and i choose to include it. It did not create a new bcd file.

Mar 26, 2013 5:05 PM in response to ThBo

I did the chkdsk in the afternoon. No error.

You did a chkdsk or a chkdsk /f or both? If you get no error, do you get maybe a dozen lines of text indicating it's actually checking something, does it confirm/deny that it's checking an NTFS volume?

The inablity to rebuild the BCD is a problem. That it finds Windows and C: means it's found the drive so I don't know what the device not found message could possibly be referring to. It's very strange that chkdsk finds an NTFS volume, but can't rebuild the BCD on that volume. The BCD is necessary for booting.

Mar 26, 2013 5:12 PM in response to ThBo

From the Windows install media, recovery console:

diskpart

list disk

Can you take a photo of the result and post the photo somewhere like imgur?

ThBo Author

Level 1

8 points

Mar 27, 2013 4:27 AM in response to Christopher Murphy

Regarding checkdisk: I did a "chkdsk /r" in the afternoon and it showed no error (after running for an hour or so). Sorry, should have been more precise.

It did state that the type of filesystem is NTFS in the first line. I checked that again this morning.

The dispart result is as follows for "disks":

Disk number Status size free Dyn GPT

Disk 0 online 119 GB 127 MB *

Disk 1 online 698 GB 128 MB

Disk 2 online 1983 MB 0 MB

Disk 2 is the USB Stick i started the Win RE from.

The "partition" result for disk 1 is:

Partition number Type size offset

Partition 1 primary 200 MB 512 B

Partition 2 primary 579 GB 200 MB

Partition 3 primary 119 GB 579 GB

I have pictures of the original german output i can upload somewhere if necessary.

Windows doesn't start anymore after re-adding disk