Help! Accidentally deleted my bootcamp while trying to increase space?

[sunny42251]

Hi, thanks for taking the time to read. My windows was running out of space so I decided to boot up my Macintosh and use Disk utility to increase my space using partitioning. I think I've done this before successfully therefore I didn't look up any guides on how to redo the same process. Big mistake. I click on the partition button on my disk utility, then there's this pie diagram displaying how the spaces are allocated, I then reduce the Macintosh partition by a few GBs, creating a space. Then by clicking the Bootcamp partition, and then clicking the minus "-" sign, I was able to increase the disk space. However, I found out that immediately afterwards that there is no longer a bootcamp option in my startup disk, and the new Bootcamp partition has no used space on it... Is there anyway to revert the changes?

 

[Mike Boreham]

Hi, thanks for taking the time to read. My windows was running out of space so I decided to boot up my Macintosh and use Disk utility to increase my space using partitioning. I think I've done this before successfully therefore I didn't look up any guides on how to redo the same process. Big mistake. I click on the partition button on my disk utility, then there's this pie diagram displaying how the spaces are allocated, I then reduce the Macintosh partition by a few GBs, creating a space. Then by clicking the Bootcamp partition, and then clicking the minus "-" sign, I was able to increase the disk space. However, I found out that immediately afterwards that there is no longer a bootcamp option in my startup disk, and the new Bootcamp partition has no used space on it... Is there anyway to revert the changes?

It has never been possible to resize the Bootcamp partition simply in Disk Utility as you describe. There are various ways and apps that will do it but I am pretty sure they all involve making an image of your Bootcamp, then deleting and recreating the Bootcamp partition, then restoring the image. I have done this successfully using Winclone, which is also a great tool for backing up your Bootcamp.

As for recovering your Bootcamp, there might be a way but it is outside my skills. A critical question is whether the Bootcamp space has been returned to the Mac side. If not then in theory your Bootcamp is still there but not accessible. If it has been returned to the Mac side I think you are out of luck.

 

[sunny42251]

It has never been possible to resize the Bootcamp partition simply in Disk Utility as you describe. There are various ways and apps that will do it but I am pretty sure they all involve making an image of your Bootcamp, then deleting and recreating the Bootcamp partition, then restoring the image. I have done this successfully using Winclone, which is also a great tool for backing up your Bootcamp.

As for recovering your Bootcamp, there might be a way but it is outside my skills. A critical question is whether the Bootcamp space has been returned to the Mac side. If not then in theory your Bootcamp is still there but not accessible. If it has been returned to the Mac side I think you are out of luck.

Thanks for the answer, I do think i made a big mistake. Fortunately nothing hugely important is lost, however I still do not have access to my windows, This is what my disk utility partition looks like right now:

and when trying to use the bootcamp assistant to reinstall windows, I come across this message:

Is there anyway to get windows back? Thanks again.

 

[Mike Boreham]

Is there anyway to get windows back? Thanks again.

Looks like it might still be there, but outside my knowledge to recover it, sorry.

 

[Mike Boreham]

Looks like it might still be there, but outside my knowledge to recover it, sorry.

Looks like the Bootcamp partition is formatted HFS+, but it should be NTFS. It looks like you erased it when you did the re-size which makes it very unlikely it could be recovered IMO.