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If I partitioned my drive from within a bootcamped windows volume will it destroy my GPT scheme and disable my booting ability into Mac OSx?

Alright I consider myself a fairly computer literate person but do excuse me if this issue is not actually all that interesting. Know that I would call apple care but what I am trying to do isn't exactly supported by them so they wouldn't help me. I am setting up my system to triple boot. I did the normal method as far as I can tell. I used bootcamp assistant to shrink my drive and installed windows through that. All went well. So then I had a apprx 400gb mac os volume and a 100gb windows volume. Following the advice from the mactel team over at the ubuntu help site I logged into windows via startup+option. When I did this all volumes popped up. recovery mac and windows. selected windows and then used the windows disk utility equivalent to shrink that partition in half. When I did this I check the disk manager and all was well. all volumes were there and healthy. When I restarted my computer in the boot manager window though only the recovery boot and the windows boot showed up. After doing a little research I figured that the error was negligible and that I could fix it easily enough later so I proceeded to then format the free space volume into an ntfs for the ubuntu setup. When I did that and restarted only the windows boot shows up in the boot menu. When I look through disk manager all of the partitions are where they should be and healthy. The only real clue I've found is that when inside of bootcamp control panel instead of the different volumes showing up as they are normally supposed to it gives me the option of startup from the windows volume the ntfs volume and a pseudo volume that doesnt physically exist that serves the purpose of windows recovery. This makes me think something went wrong with bootcamp. I would rEFIt it and try to see if theres some magic I could work in there but I can't install that program on windows. Additionally I found out that theres some talk that ssd can only handle two bootable partitions and that perhaps when I added a partition it shifted priority to volumes 2 and 3 instead of 1 and 2. I've tried all of the bootup tricks i know and some I looked up. the only one that still works is the boot manager window. The rest just do nothing and then go straight to windows which makes me thing if something happened with bootcamp that all the very low level osx to setup and then run windows on top of that- that now the operation isn't running as planned and windows is actually touching the hardware thus subverting any attempts to use low level osx tricks to get around it. Anyway those are the facts and my thoughts.


Having done more research than when I originally wrote ^^ I now realize that the entire reason for bootcamp (sans driver issues) is to deal with the difference between the use of GPT and MBR. I am now pretty sure that rewriting any part of the drive from software that uses MBR will mess up the partition scheme of the entire drive. Additionally I've seen a few things about ssd's being weird when they have too many partitions on them. And lastly I have an iso image of my computer right before I started tinkering so if anything I can factory reset and voila(I don't feel like pulling up a french keyboard).


picture from disk manager in windows


User uploaded file

MacBook Air, iOS 7.0.3, SSD 500gb

Posted on Oct 22, 2013 11:55 PM

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8 replies

Feb 24, 2014 9:38 AM in response to Rjstewart22

I actually managed to get the setup running and relatively stable. There were alot of random issues and quite honestly I was fixing my computer more often that I was using it so I backed out. If anyone wants to do this like I did I would say: It's not easy and definitely not for someone who doesn't know anything about the differences between operating systems and partitioning schemes. That being said I didn't know nearly enough and if you're careful its possible. The steps however aer pretty simple.

Before doing anything get a third party boot handle up and stable on your machine.


1. Create a partition for Windows

2. Create a partition for Linux

3. Bootcamp Windows. This step can be tricky with the extra partition because bootcamp tries to handle all of it for you so it may benefit some people to bootcamp first and then create a linux partition. But that comes with its own set of issues.

4. Run Linux setup from inside of osX NOT windows.


There are a hundred steps that could come between each of those and I neither have the expertise nor the balls to empower someone who needs to read a forum post how to do it. But it really wasn't more conceptually complicated than that.


Now on to the new issue. I was getting .NET framework incompatibilities and the whole reason I wanted the windows setup was to game so I deleted that partition. When I did that everything went back to normal EXCEPT somewhere somehow the windows boot manager is still buried and when I boot up it tries to boot into windows which obviously doesnt exist anymore. Any advise on how to get rid of this?


to make things clear I'm now running "single" partition.


@Allen Eckert

If I partitioned my drive from within a bootcamped windows volume will it destroy my GPT scheme and disable my booting ability into Mac OSx?

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