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Disk Utility Partitioning Problem

R

Rudolph II

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 15, 2013
14
0
Hello,
I have been using a rMBP with a 512GB SSD. The SSD had two partitions. A 98GB Windows 7 Bootcamp and a 414GB OS X Mavericks partition. This morning, I wanted to add a third partition. My goal was to keep the 98GB Bootcamp partition , and have two OS X Mavericks partitions of equal storage size. I created a third partition through Disk Utility and everything seemed to work fine. I attempted to boot into the Windows 7 Bootcamp, but I discovered that I can no longer access Windows 7. When I hold down the option key at start up, the bootcamp partition does not appear, however, it is listed as a partition in Disk Utility and as a Startup Disk option in System Preferences. After realizing this problem, I immediately deleted the partition that I had just created and attempted to resize my single OS X Mavericks partition back to 414GB. For some reason, I get no error message when attempting to do this in Disk Utility but the single partition reverts back to is shrunken size. At this point I have two problems. I can not resize my original partition back to the size it was (so now my SSD has blank space not used by any partition) and I cannot access Windows 7 Bootcamp. Does anyone have any ideas about how to fix this?

Thank you,
Rudolph II
 
Rudolph II said:
Hello,
I have been using a rMBP with a 512GB SSD. The SSD had two partitions. A 98GB Windows 7 Bootcamp and a 414GB OS X Mavericks partition. This morning, I wanted to add a third partition. My goal was to keep the 98GB Bootcamp partition , and have two OS X Mavericks partitions of equal storage size. I created a third partition through Disk Utility and everything seemed to work fine. I attempted to boot into the Windows 7 Bootcamp, but I discovered that I can no longer access Windows 7. When I hold down the option key at start up, the bootcamp partition does not appear, however, it is listed as a partition in Disk Utility and as a Startup Disk option in System Preferences. After realizing this problem, I immediately deleted the partition that I had just created and attempted to resize my single OS X Mavericks partition back to 414GB. For some reason, I get no error message when attempting to do this in Disk Utility but the single partition reverts back to is shrunken size. At this point I have two problems. I can not resize my original partition back to the size it was (so now my SSD has blank space not used by any partition) and I cannot access Windows 7 Bootcamp. Does anyone have any ideas about how to fix this?

Thank you,
Rudolph II
Click to expand...

If you have Boot Camp, you can't have more than two partitions. Adding a third partition will destroy the Boot Camp partition.

It happened to me once before. The only solution I could do was to remove the Boot Camp partition as well and drag the Macintosh HD partition all the way to the bottom. That was the only way I could recover my free space.
 
I was afraid that would be the only way to solve the problem! Thanks for your reply, yjchua95.

Rudolph II
 
Just to update this thread: I have found a solution. Since all the Windows 7 system files were still on my malfunctioning Bootcamp partition, I found the original Windows 7 install/repair disk. After starting up the disk, I ran a Windows repair function and it ended up acknowledging/ fixed my problem. My Bootcamp is now back up and running like usual.

Rudolph II
 
Rudolph II said:
Just to update this thread: I have found a solution. Since all the Windows 7 system files were still on my malfunctioning Bootcamp partition, I found the original Windows 7 install/repair disk. After starting up the disk, I ran a Windows repair function and it ended up acknowledging/ fixed my problem. My Bootcamp is now back up and running like usual.

Rudolph II
Click to expand...

I'm on a retina MBP and so I don't have an optical drive. And to make matters worse, I lost the USB stick that contained the bootable Windows 8 image on mine.

So I ended up getting rid of Boot Camp (I did salvage all the data from it from the OS X side though) and lived without Windows until I found the time to download another ISO from MSDN and installing it via VMware instead :)
 
Rudolph II said:
Just to update this thread: I have found a solution. Since all the Windows 7 system files were still on my malfunctioning Bootcamp partition, I found the original Windows 7 install/repair disk. After starting up the disk, I ran a Windows repair function and it ended up acknowledging/ fixed my problem. My Bootcamp is now back up and running like usual.

Rudolph II
Click to expand...

Boot Camp is running as usual you say, but do you have the 3rd partition functioning or is it deleted?
I'm trying to do similar thing, to add a 3rd partition for data (NTFS partition) but did not succeed yet.
 
mr108 said:
Boot Camp is running as usual you say, but do you have the 3rd partition functioning or is it deleted?
I'm trying to do similar thing, to add a 3rd partition for data (NTFS partition) but did not succeed yet.
Click to expand...

Hi mr108,
I haven't been on macrumors lately so I just saw your reply! I have successfully found a way to have three partitions (one for OS X 10.9, one for BootCamp Win7, one for OS X 10.10). I've been using all three partitions with no problems for about 4 months now so it seems completely stable. If you are still in need of help, let me know... I can write up a set of directions if you still need help figuring out how to get 3 working partitions.

Rudolph II
 
Thanks Rudolph II for your reply.

Yes, I will appreciate any help and instructions. I'd like to set up 3 partitions:
OS X 10.9
Win7
data partition accessible by both OS

So far I succeeded to set up Mac, Win and data partitions but the content of data partition is not visible from Win side, only from Mac side, even if I format the data partition as FAT or NTFS.
 
mr108 said:
Thanks Rudolph II for your reply.

So far I succeeded to set up Mac, Win and data partitions but the content of data partition is not visible from Win side, only from Mac side, even if I format the data partition as FAT or NTFS.
Click to expand...

Since my third partition is not a data partition, I probably cannot help much with this. If I were you, I would try formatting the data partition as Mac OS Extended format.Then, use 3rd party software such as HFSExplorer to see if you can access the data partition on the windows side.
 
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