Help! DU failed to restore 750gb mac drive

[itsaldwin]

Here's the story. A couple weeks ago I successfully installed Windows 7 Home as a bootcamp partition using Disk Utility, not Bootcamp Assisstant, I clicked on my 750gb mac drive, clicked on partition, clicked the "+" symbol to split the HDD into a second partition, allocated 200gb for this Windows 7 partition remaining 550gb for Mac HD, made it into MS-Dos Format so I can format it into NTSF during the Windows installation; everything was working fine, I even was successfully running Parallels 7 with it.

So here's my problem, the other day I purchased Windows 7 Professional, decided I wanted to do a complete new installation so I went into my Mac OS X Lion and went into Disk Utility, deleted the Windows partition, then dragged the corner of my Mac HD putting it back to 750gb. Now my bootcamp partition of Windows 7 HD is deleted so I went ahead and hit the "+" to create a partition for Windows 7 Pro HD, it gave me a Failed Error message, so I went into my Mac OS HD and repaired Disk, even hit the set permissions button), those both didnt fix my problem of creating a partition.

So i go into bootcamp assistant and went through the process, i already have the mac drives, hit continue, then it showed me what i can allocate for Windows. It tells me I only have 345gb to allocate a Windows partition, but I should have 200gb ontop of that. My total HDD is 750gb and I only have 550gb available for me to use . How do I get the remaining 200gb i used from my old windows partiton I already deleted. By the way, I already allocated 750gb to my Mac HDD freeing up all the free space.

Can anyone help? I can send screenshots if needed.

Thank you!

 

[gr8tfly]

Please open Terminal, run the following commands, and post the results:

%[B]diskutil list[/B]

%[B]sudo gpt -r show -l disk0[/B]

Hopefully, the info from those will help sort things out. I have a pretty good idea what's wrong, but might as well wait and see what your partition map looks like.

 

[itsaldwin]

i hope this helps you at all...a snapshot of above commands

http://www.freeimagehosting.net/062bd

 

[gr8tfly]

Well, it actually looks correct. My thought was that the free space had been split around the Recovery HD, but the Macintosh HD partition looks contiguous.

Disk Utility will give a warning if you try and use it to modify a partition map that it sees has a Bootcamp partition - especially if you add or remove a 3rd.(Which you didn't, but I did some experimenting and saw what happens - not only is the Windows partition no longer bootable, but adding/removing a HFS+ partition will leave the Recovery HD in the middle of free space, with no easy way to consolidate it with the initial HFS partition. So, my initial thought was that something went amiss because of skipping Bootcamp Assistant)

Usually, when Bootcamp Assistant won't create a Windows partition, it's because files are residing in the space needed for the new partition.

I'm a little confused - is Bootcamp Assistant saying the total Macintosh HD partition is 345MB instead of 750GB? or is that all it will let you allocate to a Windows partition? If the latter, that could make sense if there were files in the "upper" part of the 550GB HFS+ partition. But, you can still set Windows to 200GB. I'm just not understanding where you say 200GB is missing.

You said you already made the Macintosh HD back to 750GB. Can you now reduce it smaller than 550 in Disk Utility? If so, try and create a new HFS, apply, then remove it - then see if you can use Bootcamo Assistant to recreate the Windows partition.

I don't see anything wrong based on the info you posted. After you get things squared away, the next go around I would recommend using Bootcamp Assistant to add or remove the Windows partition. Both it and Disk Utility are "Recovery HD" partition "aware", so they will take care of moving it to stay in position following a Lion Partition.

 

[itsaldwin]

i tried something before reading your very helpful post.

I booted up into Lions Recovery Mode, went into disk utility, verified my 750gb disk and it said I need to repair it due to header problems, so i went ahead and repaired it, verified it again and said everything was OK, for good measure I verified and repaired permissions not knowing if it will make a difference

i then proceeded with booting back into my lion os, went into disc utility and performed a live partition of my 750gb into two partitions, the current MacHD into a 550gb HD and a new WindowsHD into 200gb. And there you have it! i got my 200gb back which disappeared earlier!

I will go ahead and install windows on that new drive once it is formatted into NTSF and will let you know how it goes.

so recap: had 750gb MacHD by default, partitioned it into two separate drives (MacHDD=550gb Windows=200gb), everything worked flawlessly, decided to delete the windows partition with DU, reallocated the MacHDD to bump up the 550gb back to its original 750gb capacity, it looked like it worked but said the MacHDD still only had 550gb even without the 200gb Windows partition, so then I booted into Recovery Disk Partition, entered Disk Utility, verified then repaired Disk, booted back into MacHDD, entered DU, partitioned the 750gb ToshibaHDD into two separate partitions (MacHDD=550gb Windows-200gb) it worked!!! now I'm off to install windows (no offense but i need a couple apps from it for my CIS classes)

Thank you for all your support, i will keep you updated if i run into more problems with this. Well now I've learned my lesson and to use bootcamp assistant instead of disk utility to create partitions

 

[gr8tfly]

Glad it was just some minor directory problem and was easily fixable.

Enjoy!