Hard drive swap troubles

[VPrime]

I tried swapping my Macbook Unibody hard drive into a new 13" Macbook pro to see if it would boot up properly (read on here that it should).
It didn't work right. It would boot up my windows boot camp partition but NOT the OSX partition.
So swapped the drives back into the original computers and it still wont boot!
My unibody macbook wont load up OSX, only windows. so I loaded up the Snow leopard disc to try and fix the install but it did not even see the osx partition. It only shows my windows partition.
Inside of Disk Utility it has the mac partition labeled as disk0s2 and it is grayed out/not mounted.
Repair/verify did nothing (it fails and says it can not repair).

Also manually mounting the partition in terminal does not work either.

Any one have any ideas?

 

[gr8tfly]

Did you try to fix the problem while booted into Windows (which, would be a bad thing...)? It sounds like the partition table is corrupt.

While in Disk Utility, see what type of partition table it's using. It should be GUID.

 

[VPrime]

I have not tried any thing in windows, only through install disc (disk util, and terminal)

It is still GUID.

Also, I pulled up info on the mac partition using the command 'diskutil info disk0s2'
And nothing seems out of the ordinary.. except it not being mounted.

 

[gr8tfly]

If you do "diskutil list /dev/disk0", do you still have the EFI partition (it should be disk0s1)? I'm sort of running down a "checklist" of "are these as they should be"

Try unmounting the Boot Camp partition, then see if Disk Utility can do something with the HFS+ partition. Just a thought, anyway.

I think the good news is that the partition is still there, so most likely can be repaired.

 

[VPrime]

Yep, still have the EFI partition.
Unmounting bootcamp did nothing.

 

[gr8tfly]

Seems like I've seen the "grayed out" thing before. I'll have to think about it a bit and will certainly post back if I come up with anything.

In the mean time: even though SL should be the latest/greatest Disk Utility, give 10.5 a try (and/or the MacBook's OS-X restore disk). Sometimes shotgunning works

 

[VPrime]

So nothing seems to be working..
tried fsck_hfs, fsck -y and a few other terminal commands to help repair, but no success.

I put the drive into a usb enclosure and the macbook pro can see it.. OSX pops up saying it can be repaired but I can access all of my data so that is a good sign.

I have been reading that diskworrior is something that can help with this, I will give that a try and report back.

 

[VPrime]

Small update:
Diskwarrior helped a bit.. It didn't let me boot OSX, but it did try and boot (also tried in verbose single user, and safe mode).. which was a good sign..
It also let the snow leopard disk mount the partition and sees it to install on.
So I am currently reinstalling Snow leopard overtop (according to google it will automatically do an archive and reinstall).
Hopefully this fixes every thing.

 

[gr8tfly]

Disk Warrior was going to be my next suggestion, though not everyone has access to it (or is willing to invest). It's a priceless tool at times.

Sounds like you will be able to migrate to a clean install of SL. So, you'll be up and running.

Now, to migrate to your other machine, you can use ethernet to the MBP, or, even faster - put the MB drive back into the USB enclosure (if you're up to it after all the swapping), connect to the MBP, and use the migration assistant on the MBP.

btw: Enjoy your new MBP!

 

[VPrime]

Well the install didn't work so well. It was bootable and I could go into OSX, but all of my apps were broken (and some missing). So time for a clean install (which I wanted to avoid ).

Thanks for trying to help.

Oh, and migrating wont be needed as I was just trying to trade my Unibody macbook for my brothers macbook pro (he needed the 2 audio ports that mine has) but didn't want to go through the hassle of migrating things
But I think that fell through (for now atleast).