Lion doesn't recognize Bootcamp :(

Hello all, I'm a newbie in Macrumors

I started using Mac in November 2010 with my first purchase, MacBook Air 11" with 4GB RAM and 128GB SSD. Soon after bought the laptop, I installed Windows 7 using Bootcamp, in fear of not being able to adapt to the Mac environment. So now I have 86.88 GB for Mac HD and 16.17 GB for Bootcamp.

But it turns out that I rarely used the Windows, except for Matlab use (which later I substitute by installing native Matlab app for Mac), and writing & compiling my research paper in LaTeX. I write paper using English & Japanese, and sadly I never had a success compiling LaTeX document in Japanese using any of Mac native LaTeX app

Anyway, the Bootcamp setup was quite a hassle, so I have no desire to throw it away for the time being.

The problem is, as of installing Lion yesterday, it didn't recognize my Bootcamp partition, either in the booting process or by BootCamp Assistant. When running BootCamp Assistant, it asked me to create new partition for Windows by splitting 120 GB Mac HD. However, using iStat Pro widget, it is clearly shown that my BootCamp partition is alive & still there.

Hopefully I could get some help in this
Thank you...

gentlefury said:

its fine on mine.

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What do you mean, it's fine?
Do you immediately get the option to boot either into Mac or BootCamp without doing any further setup?

GuerillaTech said:

did you try to boot up your recovery partition and try Verify Disk and Repair Disk?

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Err.. I'm not sure that I have a recovery partition...
Sorry for being so clueless

torpy said:

Can you tell me what the output of 'diskutil list' is if you type that into Terminal?

Click to expand...

Ok here it is:

/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *121.3 GB disk0
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 97.2 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3
4: Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP 23.3 GB disk0s4

By the way, I was confused to find Bootcamp has 23.3 GB... bcoz I had already resize the partition into 16.7 GB. It stinks of problem
What do you think..?

SOLVED! Somehow

I rebooted and hold down Option Key, and I could see three disks: MacHD, Windows, and Recovery. When I chose Windows, it booted into it, giving message that my Windows partition is "dirty", doing recovery or something like that (you know, the usual procedures in blue screen), and when it finished, the MBA automatically rebooted and Voila! The reFIT boot screen was there.

Now I can access the Bootcamp partition
(although, curiously, the supposedly-shrinked 16.7 GB partition was detected back to before - 20.38 GB, and the free space has gone down from 7 GB to only 2.90 GB...)

Anyway, the case is somewhat solved