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Xenochria

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 16, 2011
9
0
Specs:

MacBook Air 2013
8GB RAM
i7
512GB SSD


Hello all, looking for some assistance.

My HD is formatted to 400GB of OSX and 80GB of Boot Camp. I stupidly made the mistake of adding a new partition out of the large amount of free space I have on the OSX partition, to format the new partition for Windows. This made Boot Camp no longer boot. On the Disk select screen after holding Option on boot, my Boot Camp partition is not visible. I can see everything on the partition on OSX, however.

To try and fix this, I deleted the new partition and tried to reduce the hard drive back to the original two partitions. However, I cannot extend the OSX partition to fill in the new free space. So now I have a Boot Camp partition, my OSX partition, and 20GB of unused, free space that I cannot use or put back into the original partition.

I asked AppleCare live chat for any assistance, they suggested that I use "Erase free space" in Disk Utility to use the space again. However, the option is greyed out on both the drive and the Macintosh HD partition.

After a bit of googling I saw a suggestion of making a USB Recovery drive to get the space back through Disk Utility that way. This still did not work; the results were the same, unable to add the space back to the original partition, and "Erase free space" is still greyed out.

Using BootChamp (notice the H, this is an app that allows you to restart and boot directly into Boot Camp through OSX), I get a DOS screen saying "No bootable device – insert boot disk and press any key". I cannot get this screen any other way.

I have repaired and verified the disk and its permissions, to no avail.

I cannot think of anything else to do short of formatting the entire drive but this is obviously less than preferable. I additionally do not have a backup of the BootCamp partition (as it is not accessible), even though everything is visible on the partition through OSX.

So, in summary, I added a new partition to my HD and now Boot Camp will not boot. Any ideas?
 
I would get back in touch with AppleCare live chat to see what their response is to the greyed out options you mentioned.
 
MacBook Air 2013
...
So, in summary, I added a new partition to my HD and now Boot Camp will not boot. Any ideas?

Use the Windows Installer (USB or DVD) to "Repair Start-up Disk". It can resolve your current problem.

Or just delete Windows partition and the new one that you created, then the Recovery HD partition. Then reinstall Windows and create a new partition again.
 
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