How to recover bootcamp partition

[therealynot]

Hey

have 5 partitions. 3 of which I created for my Mac OS Lion installation, Windows 7 installation and a 3rd for storage. Everything was running fine for quite sometime until recently. My Windows 7 installation has suddenly stopped booting. Instead of a start up screen I get:

Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause.

File: \BOOT\BCD
Status: 0xc000000d
Info: An error occurred while attempting to read the boot configuration data

Mac OS Lion starts up fine. I'm unable to mount my "Bootcamp" partition nor the "Storage" partition. On top of that "Storage" has been renamed to "disk0s5". When I installed Windows 7 it didn't recognize the "Storage" partition that was created in Lion so it merged what it thought was free diskspace (I'm assuming the same space that Mac OS recognized as Storage) to the Root Drive of Windows 7 (Bootcamp).

Are you able to assist?

 

[snowboardfoo]

Hey

have 5 partitions. 3 of which I created for my Mac OS Lion installation, Windows 7 installation and a 3rd for storage. Everything was running fine for quite sometime until recently. My Windows 7 installation has suddenly stopped booting. Instead of a start up screen I get:

Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause.

File: \BOOT\BCD
Status: 0xc000000d
Info: An error occurred while attempting to read the boot configuration data

Mac OS Lion starts up fine. I'm unable to mount my "Bootcamp" partition nor the "Storage" partition. On top of that "Storage" has been renamed to "disk0s5". When I installed Windows 7 it didn't recognize the "Storage" partition that was created in Lion so it merged what it thought was free diskspace (I'm assuming the same space that Mac OS recognized as Storage) to the Root Drive of Windows 7 (Bootcamp).

Are you able to assist?

If I was you i'd back everything up, and format all of the drives except the main 2 (OS & Windows drives). I've seen macosx have disk errors it cannot recover out of nowhere, while windows could read the drive fine still... Formatted and all better

 

[MJL]

Before doing anything try to secure the data.

If you have a backup on external and can boot from something external by either have on an external drive OS X or having 'another Mac and using this misbehaving Mac as a target drive' then you can copy all the important stuff of the windows drive before starting fiddle around.

Fiddling around:

Before fiddling around make a full backup of your OS X installation. If your time machine drive is nearly full it may not have early backups which means that it has been deleting the early backups and you might not be able to a full restore and have only part of the data (oldest missing). In that case you'll have to get extra external media to make a full backup.

First thing I would try to do is to take the windows install disk and boot from that (if your machine is one of the last few years it should be able to boot from either DVD or a bootable USB key). If missing the install disk make on another windows machine a "system repair disk" and boot from that. It will recover however often it does destroy the OS X hybrid partition scheme (GUID partitioning). This might be one of the better bets (I did this recently and it worked).

If OS X gets affected try to boot from an external OS X installation and try to salvage OS X by using disk utility.

Never start off with reformatting - that is only the last resort.

Perhaps some others have more ideas.

I always backup the bootcamp partition when I have made program changes or done an install and am using Winclone for that (shareware, from memory it is about twenty dollars and well worth it) which has also a restore option of replacing the bcd boot to a generic one (needed when moving from one machine to another or when changing the configuration). The earlier mentioned windows system repair disk also can fix BCD boot errors.

Good luck!

PS it may be that 5 partitions is the cause - windows does not normally recognise more than 4 partitions. There are tricks around that but I am not familiar with those.