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Help! Can't Boot into Mac!

aaronhead14

aaronhead14

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Mar 9, 2009
1,261
5,386
I have a huge problem! I decided to set up boot camp with windows 7 about a week ago. I haven't had any problems except for one thing -- i decided i wanted my windows partition to be larger after i had all my apps installed. So what i did is i shrinked my os x partition and that left some unallocated space. then i went into windows to try and stretch the windows partition, but it wouldn't work... so i downloaded easeus partition manager and tried that too, but it didnt work either. so i decided to try and create a new ntfs volume with the unalocated space. it worked, but ended with an error. then when i checked the volumes in easeus, it said my Mac partition was unallocated space!! but here's where it gets weird: when i'm in windows and i check disk management, it says the mac partition is fine! i even went into the drive (inside of windows) and all my mac files were there! even when i hold down option when i boot, it only displays the windows hard drive, so i can't boot into snow leopard. is there anything i can do without having to reinstall snow leopard? i am backing up all my files right now on an external (since i can view the drive in windows), but i really don't want to have to reinstall all my applications and then transfer my files back over.

any help is appreciated,
thanks,
Aaron
 
hmmm, no response... after a whole hour... i guess i just posted at the wrong time of day....

but seriously... has any one else had this issue? or does anyone know how i can solve this problem?
 
Have you tried booting up with the OS X installer DVD, running Disk Utility, and doing a disk verify/repair? Also, do you have access to Disk Warrior? It might be able to help.

Good luck!
 
ok, thanks guys. i'll try these out and see what happens. and balamw, i did read that guide. the method i used was "Native OS utilities." But thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

-Aaron
 
ok... i got nothing. when i booted from the SL install disc and went into disk utility, it didn't even show my mac partition on the left side where it shows all the disks... i went into "partition" after clicking on the hitachi disk and it showed that my mac partition was "free space." so i cant even verify and repair it through disk utility! but the weird thing is that i can still view my whole drive in windows. is there some kind of boot disc i can download in windows and burn that will allow me to repair my mac partition?

thanks again
 
aaronhead14 said:
ok... i got nothing. when i booted from the SL install disc and went into disk utility, it didn't even show my mac partition on the left side where it shows all the disks... i went into "partition" after clicking on the hitachi disk and it showed that my mac partition was "free space." so i cant even verify and repair it through disk utility! but the weird thing is that i can still view my whole drive in windows.
Click to expand...
That sounds like your GPT and MBR partition tables are massively out of sync. OS X is looking at the GPT, Windows is looking at the MBR and they aren't the same.

You might be able to use a gparted live disc to try and correct things, but it would really be nice to know what's going on first.

I posted a utility called showpart (from the rEFIt source tree) in this thread: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1070175/ All it does is display the contents of the two partition tables. You should be able to stick it on a USB stick, boot to your OS X install disc, Open Terminal and run it to display what's going on with your partition tables.

I put a warning in the Native OS Utilities section that it hasn't worked out well and your mileage may vary. Definitely nowhere was Easeus mentioned as a tool that works. My guess is although it claims to support GPT it supports only Windows' variants of GPT and didn't like what it saw from the Mac tools.

B
 
Last edited:
okay, i downloaded showpart, but i'm not exactly sure how to run it in terminal after i boot with the os x disc. i'm just not huge on command line.
 
i extracted the zip and put just the file on a thumb drive with nothing else on the drive. just what do i type in terminal?

thanks a ton

Aaron
 
aaronhead14 said:
okay, i downloaded showpart, but i'm not exactly sure how to run it in terminal after i boot with the os x disc. i'm just not huge on command line.
Click to expand...

When you boot from the OS X install disc there is a menu item called Tools, one of the selections there is Terminal. Insert your USB drive, which will get mounted as /Volumes/<USB> where <USB> is the volume label on your thumb drive. In terminal type:

Code: 
sudo /Volumes/<USB>/showpart /dev/disk0

I'm assuming showpart is in the root folder of your USB and your main HDD is available as /dev/disk0.

B
 
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Okay so I tried that and all I'm getting is "-bash: sudo: command not found"
 
aaronhead14 said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Okay so I tried that and all I'm getting is "-bash: sudo: command not found"
Click to expand...

Grr. I guess you may already have admin rights so try it without the sudo.

B
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Hmmm never could get it going. So ive just decided to reinstall SL. But thanks for your help guys!
 
Last edited:
Alright, everything's back in order now. In case anybody wanted to know.

Thanks again, and happy new year!
 
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