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Deleted My Mac Partition On Accident - PLEASE HELP!!!!

S

stefanjames

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 4, 2010
10
0
Hello,

I setup a Bootcamp Partition to run Windows. I set it to only 10gb to save all of my space on my Mac OS. I wanted to delete it completely because it was doing some funny things on the Windows side but I accidentally deleted the Mac OSX Partition!!!! Now when I start up my computer it only starts up on Windows with the 10gb partition. Please is there anyone that can walk me through this crisis??????

I want to restore my Mac OsX partition with all of my important importation on it!!!! I'm so frustrated right now.

If anyone can help I'd be much appreciated!!
 
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Hopefully you have a Time Machine backup available. Rebuild your partition, reinstall OS/X and transfer your files and settings back via Time Machine.

If you don't have a Time Machine backup, as the other person said "you're screwed!"
 
SandboxGeneral said:
If you don't have a Time Machine backup, as the other person said "you're screwed!"
Click to expand...

mm
there are options, their just too tedious to bother with imo, I'd much rather just do a clean install. I do have backup of a lot of stuff on mobileme though.
 
DAMNIT!!!!!!!!! When I try to install the Mac OsX cd it says I cannot install it because I have only 10gb of space.

I did go to Disk Utility and I see the disk that was deleted. There is no way I can restore this?? My computer doesn't even boot up to Mac anymore!
 
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You'll have to use Disk Utility to 'Erase' the hard drive space that is not allocated to the 10GB Windows partition and format it for OS/X Journaled. Then OS/X can be installed from disc. You will/already have lost everything shy of sending the drive away to a recovery company.

Maybe there's a trick out there that someone else may know, but I think this is you're only course of action.
 
I can't "chill" This is ALL of my important information we're talking about. It's there but the disk is greyed out. It has 137.9GB of my information that I cannot access.

The 10GB is what I only have on the start up. I don't know how to restore it.
 
mulo said:
just means its not mounted.
run disk and permission repair, boot with option down.
Click to expand...

Verify Disk Permissions and Repair Disk Permissions is Greyed out.
When I click on Verify and Repair Disk I get an error
 
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mulo said:
just means its not mounted.
run disk and permission repair, boot with option down.
Click to expand...

Give that a try and let us know how it goes. I'm interested to hear the outcome.
 
Alright, it sounds like you deleted the partition.

Unfortunately, while there are plenty of partition undelete tools out there, about 99.9% of them are for standard MBR disks; while Apple uses GPT.

A quick search only turns up one utility that even claims to have GPT undelete support: R-Studio. I have no knowledge of this package, other than it turns up in a Google search for "undelete GPT partition".

Aha! Another search, and TestDisk, which is Open Source, may be able to undelete the partition. Until you try a partition undelete utility, do *NOT* re-create a partition in the empty space!
 
stefanjames said:
Verify Disk Permissions and Repair Disk Permissions is Greyed out.
When I click on Verify and Repair Disk I get an error
Click to expand...

I did the same thing last year, I took the drive out and did a clean install on a new drive and a friend accessed the old drive via USB on another computer and ran some recovery software which allowed me to copy everything back on to my newly installed drive.

They weren't able to make the disk bootable again but were able to recover everything.

All you've probably done is deleted the partition information.

Try something like this before you go reinstalling anything and making it worse.

Hope that helps
 
Now my computer just says Missing Operating System on the Windows side. The Max OSx CD is in the computer and can't eject it now. I'm screwed I'll just take it to Apple. Thanks everyone.
 
stefanjames said:
Now my computer just says Missing Operating System on the Windows side. The Max OSx CD is in the computer and can't eject it now. I'm screwed I'll just take it to Apple. Thanks everyone.
Click to expand...

here it comes again, chill dude...

stefanjames said:
Verify Disk Permissions and Repair Disk Permissions is Greyed out.
When I click on Verify and Repair Disk I get an error
Click to expand...

that error could be pretty important, care to post it?
 
mulo said:
here it comes again, chill dude...



that error could be pretty important, care to post it?
Click to expand...

When I click Repair Disk it says

"Disk Utility stopped repairing "disk0s2" because the follower error was encountered:

Filesystem verify or repair failed."

Don't know what to do from this point
 
Last edited by a moderator:
So I'll probably won't get my information back. I can't get even install the Mac OSx because of the 10gb. :(
 
depending on how patient you are and how important it is to recover the partition, you might be able to rebuild it... as long as you didn't format the partition, but simply changed the partition table, the data is still on your disk and intact. so, all you need to do is rebuild the partition map so the macosx partition is pointing at the right place again.

i would do a couple of things first...

ask in the mac pro forum here. some of them do a lot of disk hacking (installing refit for getting ahci mode in windows via boot camp, lots of creative disk setups, etc).

go to a forum like ubuntuforums.org (particularily in the Apple Computer section) and search around for recreating the partition map/table. lots of people in there have experience setting up multi-boot on their macs and some may have had the same problems as you're facing.

sorry i can't be of more help...

good luck.
 
Do you have a friend that could connect the drive via USB and see if they can at least format and partition the drive? They can also see if they can access the partition although i doubt it. Also not to be mean but this is why you should keep current backups and not mess with things you do not understand if its on a system with important files.
 
So to verify, you see something like this?
partitions.png


If so, FIRST try the repair utilities mentioned before.

If they fail, you can just click in the space I have marked [Former Mac OS X], choose a format (Mac OS Extended Journaled is best,) and click Apply. That will create a brand-new partition you can install OS X in. Your 10 GB partition is the Windows partition, and trying to install there would just break your Windows installation.

Note: If you can't recover the OS X partition, and the Windows partition is broken as well (and you don't have anything worth saving,) then you would be better off just reformatting and starting over. To do that, choose "1 Partition", make it Mac OS Extended Journaled, install OS X, then run Boot Camp to install Windows.

When installing Windows through Boot Camp follow the directions about which partition to install on!
 
Anonymous Freak said:
A quick search only turns up one utility that even claims to have GPT undelete support: R-Studio. I have no knowledge of this package, other than it turns up in a Google search for "undelete GPT partition".
Click to expand...

I can vouch for R-studio. It is the best recovery software I have encountered and I have used it several times. Make sure you get the right one. And DO NOT erase or format that partition until you try the recovery.
 
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