After updating to Maverick, Windows 7 bootcamp partition can't mount

[***Note to other users.. I'm not a huge Mac user and had no idea how to run these kinds of commands. It's not as complicated as it looks. Go to Applications > Utilities and run "Terminal". Then you can simply copy and paste these commands. It's like running CMD or getting to the DOS prompt in Windows. Then you can press CMD+SHIFT+4 to get a screen capture of the output which will appear as an image file on your desktop. Just sayin' 🙂]

Loner T Aug 1, 2014 8:49 AM
in response to blairoverthere

Can you also post the output of this command to check if your NTFS file system is intact?

sudo dd if=/dev/rdisk0s4 count=1 2>/dev/null | hexdump -C

Sure, no problem:

Oh that's sad news. I have some backups but there is a good deal on there that isn't backed up. It's a boot camp / Windows 7 setup. So yes, I could reinstall Windows 7 but that would destroy any data, no? I would do that as a last resort of course. I used Disk Drill Pro to make DMG copy of the Bootcamp partition onto an external drive. It's also able to scan and retrieve what looks to be most of the data. Unfortunately, it's all in the form "file000001.doc" and that kind of thing--no directory structure. Is it helpful at all to know that Disk Drill can find and scan the partition for data? When you say the NTFS system is damaged, does that mean the data are there but that the file name/location information is messed up?

Thank you Chris. This is my first time using test disk. When it prompted me to select a media, I chose the first disk listed because it looked like my primary drive. It warned me that it wouldn't be able to make changes to it (good, I thought). I got this (attached image) and then I opted to continue with the "Quick Search" option. It's running through that now, telling me that a number of my boot sectors are invalid, can't be found or are mismatched. Is that consistent with your suggestion that the starting point may be wrong? Would it help to attach that output? My apologies if I'm not running the right commands here. Not totally sure where to find test disk's guess at the correct starting point.

Is this it? Does this mean the NTFS partition entry point is 238769272 rather than 487000064? Both are listed there and both are given as 750GB. If it's important, the 487... one is listed with "NTFS found using backup sector". I should also mention I haven't yet tried the bootrec.exe with /FixMbr and/or /FixBoot options. I have a Windows 7 recovery CD that gives me a DOS prompt if it would be a good idea to try either of those options.

list files in these blocks and confirm they are correct

Thanks Loner T.. any chance you could point me in the right direction to do that? I'll start into the documentation but, unfortunately, I've only just started learning test disk today.

OK, will do. To confirm:

For "select a media" I'm choosing "/dev/disk0 - 1000 GB / 931 GiB (RO)" and not the rdisk0 version which looks the same

For partition table type, I'm selecting "Intel/PC" (even though it says "hint: EFI GPT partition table type has been detected")

Then I'm selecting "Analyse"

Should I change any of that?

It says:

Note tho that if I select the HPFS-NTFS partition 203046360 from here:

That I see this: