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Boot Camp disappeared after installing El Capitan

Hi, I have a lot of important files on my windows 8.1 Boot Camp partition and they were not backed up recently. I upgraded from Yosemite to el capitan OS X 10.10 this afternoon and the screen froze on reboot and then booted into windows with an error. After I rebooted it back into OS X it continued with the install however the Boot Camp partition is not visible from the disk utility although you can see it and select it upon pressing on the Option key during startup. If the windows partition is selected a recovery error is shown for windows, even with the usb key inserted.

Macbook Pro mid-2014 1TB SSD Approximately 700G OS X and 300G Windows 8.1

Here are my results from the terminal prompt tests mentioned in earlier threads.

Any help is appreciated, working on figuring out how to run test disk from the command prompt. New to macs.

Thanks!

Posted on Oct 19, 2015 8:55 PM

72 replies

Loner T

Level 9

59,536 points

Oct 23, 2015 2:13 PM in response to OptionJ

Neither will work. If you boot and press Command+R, and you see a spinning globe, your Recovery HD is corrupt, and the Mac is falling over to Internet Recovery.

OptionJ Author

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Oct 23, 2015 2:15 PM in response to Loner T

is it possible to clone a good recovery HD and boot from that?

Loner T

Level 9

59,536 points

Oct 23, 2015 2:28 PM in response to OptionJ

This is the only method - How to install OS X on an external drive connected to your Mac - Apple Support - that is reliable. You can either use a flash drive or an external USB HDD formatted appropriately.

OptionJ Author

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Oct 23, 2015 2:50 PM in response to Loner T

Ok this is different. I restarted pressing the option key and selected the grey 'EFI' (which IIRC appeared in the boot menu when I turned off file vault in Macintosh HD several steps back) that put me into what apparently is 'Recovery HD' not sure how but it allowed me to run 'csrutil disable' in terminal and after rebooting this is the message it gave me upon running 'csrutil status':

OptionJ Author

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Oct 23, 2015 2:46 PM in response to Loner T

Ok here is the screen output after changing the GPT for 2 to AF05:

Loner T

Level 9

59,536 points

Oct 23, 2015 2:59 PM in response to OptionJ

Can you now test booting OS X normally? You may need to boot in Safe Mode first.

OptionJ Author

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Oct 23, 2015 5:54 PM in response to Loner T

I shut it off and left it for a few minutes. After starting back up it went into the black screen of death for about 2 minutes then gave me the bitlocker screen. I used my password and it booted into windows 8.1. After jumping up and down and looking like an idiot for a few minutes I backed up every file I could find manually onto an external drive as quickly as I could.

Thanks for your help in recovering the Bootcamp partition of windows 8.1!! Changing that GUID over apparently allowed the MBR to boot windows?

I am going to start over fresh with a reformat and OS X only, no bootcamp. I am thinking about using VM Ware or Parallels for any windows or linux OS's. Any experiences with either, pro or con? Thanks again!!

Loner T

Level 9

59,536 points

Oct 23, 2015 6:09 PM in response to OptionJ

1. Can you test OS X booting and make sure you can get a clean back up?

2. I personally prefer Fusion to Parallels. My experiences with Parallels have been less than stellar. I would use VirtualBox instead of Parallels , if necessary.

OptionJ Author

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Oct 23, 2015 7:09 PM in response to Loner T

It won't boot into OS X. It will boot into Recovery HD. When pressing option after powering up the only 2 options are Windows and EFI Boot. My guess is this is due to the Windows 8.1 repair using Bootrec repair MBR in an earlier step?

I will look at Fusion for the VM. Working on figuring out the best method for a reformat and clean install of OS X El Capitan.

Loner T

Level 9

59,536 points

Oct 23, 2015 7:55 PM in response to OptionJ

If you bring up Recovery Console, do you see a Reinstall OS X Option.

OptionJ Author

Level 1

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Oct 24, 2015 7:42 AM in response to Loner T

Yes

Loner T

Level 9

59,536 points

Oct 24, 2015 9:11 AM in response to OptionJ

If you are planning to reinstall ELC, my recommendation is to backup OS X and Windows, boot into Internet Recovery, erase your internal disk, and install a fresh copy of ELC and then install Windows.

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Boot Camp disappeared after installing El Capitan