External Hard Drive Issues after Partitioning to back up Windows and Mac - Bootcamp

[jimbobmango]

Yesterday I finally got round to installing Windows 7 via Bootcamp on my 13" Unibody MacBook Pro. I wanted to do this in order to used 3DS Max (I am a university student) and so that I can play The Old Republic when it comes out.

Earlier, after realising that 50gb partitioned for Windows was not enough for what I wanted to do, I bought Paragon Camptune earlier so that I could easily change the size of the Partition for Windows. First I decided to back up what I had already download onto Windows in case there were any errors.

I looked online and found out I could also partition my external Hard Drive (WD My Passport 1TB) so that I could back up to both OSX and Windows to the same drive. I followed instructions which told me to first decrease the size of my Mac formatted section of the external drive through Disk Utility, I then rebooted into Windows and reformatted the new section of empty space (which is about 80GB) so that this section could be used to back up my Windows files.

After I had backed up I then rebooted into Mac and realised that only the new section of the external drive (the Windows section) was showing up. After searching around the internet to resolve my problem for most of the day it is still unresolved.

I have tried Verifying and Repairing it through Disk Utility but it comes up with the following error:

'Invalid BS_jmpBoot in boot block: 000000'

I also tried using DiskWarrior to which the error came up saying:

'Directory cannot be rebuilt, the file system is unsupported'

I can however access the Mac formatted section through Windows. Some of the files are there, except a large number of video files and DMGs. I understand that I could copy the files through Windows to another device and reformat the drive, but I am hoping very much that the Videos and DMGs are still on the drive and can be rescued.

Is there anyway to get my External Drive functioning properly again on Mac?
(sorry for the very long-winded explanation)

 

[johnhurley]

Is there anyway to get my External Drive functioning properly again on Mac?
(sorry for the very long-winded explanation)

Is there data on your external drive that you do not have anywhere else right now?

If all the stuff you care about is already somewhere else ( your macbook pro maybe ? ) then start by wiping out again your external hard drive.

Use the macbook pro disk utility and erase the whole drive then create 2 partitions on it. One for time machine backups and mac os x stuff and the other for windows backups. Use mac file system for the 1st partition and a windows partitioning format for the other partition.

Then don't do anything else until you get a good solid new time machine backup onto that external drive. Also get a new win 7 system image onto the 2nd partition.

Go slowly 1 step at a time and make sure you understand the implications of each step.

The paragon camp tune thing may or may not work very well. No one on these forums seems to have used it much. That says a lot probably.

 

[jimbobmango]

Is there data on your external drive that you do not have anywhere else right now?

Yeh there's some video files and some DMG files that are only on the external drive. I removed them to make some space on my Mac. If I can recover them that would be brilliant, but if not then it's not too important that they get lost.

 

[MJL]

I am using Paragon Partition Manager under Windows. Cannot remember the exact details but I have lost partitions when trying to resize OSX and Windows. Only item I trust it to do now is to resize a Windows partition and to create an OS X partition. Then before using the OS X partition I will erase the OS X partition under OS X (Lion or Snow Leopard).

Try to copy as much off as possible - anything you cannot see is likely lost. (I have not found a way to recover).

 

[jimbobmango]

In the end I just recovered my files from the drive and re-formated it, a different way to last time and it works fine now