Failed Lion Install Trashed my Drive

[yetieater]

*Fixed Updated 7/29/2011

Guys

I have a 500GB internal HDD partitioned with 32GB for Win7 Boot Camp, the rest going to OS X. I committed an upgrade install from SL 10.6.8 to Lion 10.7. Noted one issue in the install log when it came time to migrate my user data, but thought nothing of it. Upon reboot, I get the spinning wheel with logo for a couple of minutes, and then a "No Entry" / "Do Not Enter" sign. I understand that this is bad news.

I tried running in Verbose and Single User Mode, but the boot hangs up at one point. I get a message "Still waiting for root device" and the rest is history.

Booting into the Lion Recovery Partition, I have access to all the utilities. I run Disk Utility and note that my former OS X partition is unmounted. It also claims that the file system is FAT32, which is a blatant lie. Come on, disk utility. Disk Utility claims that the disk has errors beyond its ability to repair and gives up.

I downloaded some software for Win7, MacDrive 8, which claims to have repair tools for Mac drives. The weird thing is that MacDrive 8 recognizes the OS X partition as HFSJ file system, and allows me to navigate its contents.

What should I try next?!

--- FIX ---

Installed SL on an external harddrive and booted
Noted that Disk Utility still maintained that original OS X partition was Windows format. Blatant lies!
DiskWarrior refused to touch it because it wasn't HFS
So the solution?
Followed the advice given on: http://osx86.sojugarden.com/2009/10...f-you-broke-it-with-the-chameleon-bootloader/

MBR SOLUTION:

Boot your mac with an OS X Install DVD (doesn’t matter which version, whatever is installed on your system would be best) and use Terminal on it to run the following commands.

Once booted into the GUI, open a terminal and type

diskutil list

to get a list of all disks on your system. Assuming /dev/disk2 is your problematic disk with the MBR partition scheme, type

sudo fdisk /dev/disk2

to verify the current partitions on it (should list partitions on the disk, if not don’t worry it’s likely because of the chameleon bootloader). This command will not apply any changes. The drive with an “*” next to it is the active partition (if any). Now type

sudo fdisk -u /dev/disk2

which writes a new MBR (master boot record) while keeping current partition information.

In order to be able to boot from a partition, it must be flagged active. Type

sudo fdisk -e /dev/disk2

to open the drive in fdisk’s editing mode. It will possibly complain “could not open MBR file /usr/standalone/i386/boot0: No such file or directory”, this should be safe to ignore. The following transcript shows what to do next:

fdisk: 1> flag 2
Partition 2 marked active.
fdisk:*1> quit
Writing current MBR to disk.

You’re done! Cross your fingers and reboot your MAC…

Worked for me!

 

[RickyB]

Guys

I have a 500GB internal HDD partitioned with 32GB for Win7 Boot Camp, the rest going to OS X. I committed an upgrade install from SL 10.6.8 to Lion 10.7. Noted one issue in the install log when it came time to migrate my user data, but thought nothing of it. Upon reboot, I get the spinning wheel with logo for a couple of minutes, and then a "No Entry" / "Do Not Enter" sign. I understand that this is bad news.

I tried running in Verbose and Single User Mode, but the boot hangs up at one point. I get a message "Still waiting for root device" and the rest is history.

Booting into the Lion Recovery Partition, I have access to all the utilities. I run Disk Utility and note that my former OS X partition is unmounted. It also claims that the file system is FAT32, which is a blatant lie. Come on, disk utility. Disk Utility claims that the disk has errors beyond its ability to repair and gives up.

I downloaded some software for Win7, MacDrive 8, which claims to have repair tools for Mac drives. The weird thing is that MacDrive 8 recognizes the OS X partition as HFSJ file system, and allows me to navigate its contents.

What should I try next?!

Rescue your documents to an external disk using MacDrive whilst you can in case the whole thing fails.

 

[yetieater]

Rescue your documents to an external disk using MacDrive whilst you can in case the whole thing fails.

I forgot to mention. Time Machine has been taking backups of everything for the past 6 months.

I want to recover the drive. I have a copy of Disk Warrior that I will try next.

 

[RaceTripper]

I forgot to mention. Time Machine has been taking backups of everything for the past 6 months.

I want to recover the drive. I have a copy of Disk Warrior that I will try next.

Why not just reformat and restore from backup.

When I installed Lion, I cloned my internal drive, booted from the clone and reformatted my internal. Then I did a clean install of Lion and restored everything else from Time Machine. That worked great and went smoothly. In addition, Time Machine recognized the upgrade and did an incremental backup instead of a full backup.

 

[yetieater]

Why not just reformat and restore from backup.

When I installed Lion, I cloned my internal drive, booted from the clone and reformatted my internal. Then I did a clean install of Lion and restored everything else from Time Machine. That worked great and went smoothly. In addition, Time Machine recognized the upgrade and did an incremental backup instead of a full backup.

This is an excellent point. It does require that I burn the Lion install to a DVD at this point. Which is good, because I have access to the installer's .DMG. I would hate to lose my Boot Camp partition. That is why I feel the Disk Warrior option may be best to try first.

 

[RaceTripper]

This is an excellent point. It does require that I burn the Lion install to a DVD at this point. Which is good, because I have access to the installer's .DMG. I would hate to lose my Boot Camp partition. That is why I feel the Disk Warrior option may be best to try first.

I put the Lion Installer on the cloned drive I rebooted from. It did not have to burn an installer.

 

[yetieater]

Fixed