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NTFS Partition Shows Up as HFS+

flopticalcube

flopticalcube

macrumors G4
Original poster
Sep 7, 2006
10,481
234
In the velcro closure of America's Hat
I'm working on an iMac that has Vista (yuck!) installed on the hard drive. When I boot up and external with OSX, the internal partition is not recognized by Finder. Disk Utility claims its HFS+ but will not mount it. When I boot the machine with GParted, it also claims the partition is HFS+. It looks like Vista was installed over the OSX partition and the GUID still thinks its HFS+. Is there a way to correct this so that it shows up as NTFS? I would like to use GParted or WinClone to back up the partition.
 
Ick. I'd be afraid that GParted and Winclone would also image it as HFS+.

Assuming that Vista boots, I'd try to image it from within Windows. (I like Acronis) So, you'd be seeing the protective MBR.

B
 
Yes, its messy. I'll try and use Acronis from inside to image it. Hopefully I'll get a workable image. If it does work, I'll reformat the drive and give it a small OSX partition of 30GB and then bootcamp the remainder and reinstall the image.
 
OK.

Acronis partition backup. (need the + pack for GUID drives :rolleyes: )
Reformat drive into 2 partitions.
Load OSX onto one.
Using Acronis, reload backup onto other.
Reset PRAM.
Run Vista DVD. Repair MBR. Rebuild BCD.

Upon reboot: Bootmgr is missing.

Manually trying to repair bootmgr doesn't help.

All the data is there, it just won't boot. Any ideas?

(Boy, I hate Windows :D )

EDIT: FIXED!

There is a problem with Acronis noted here.

After going through the outlined procedure (post-recovery) and then running the Vista repair and bootsect/bootrec repairs several times, I finally achieved boot!

(Boy, I hate Windows :D )
 
flopticalcube said:
(Boy, I hate Windows :D )
Click to expand...
LOL.

Which Acronis did you use? The link you provided implied this was not necessary for TI 2010 with plus pack.

I just built my first cheap generic DIY PC in over 7 years recently*, and find the new Vista/7 boot loader to be a royal piece of <censored>. It seems really fragile compared to the older boot.ini method. It broke multiple times while trying to install, Snow Leopard, Win 98 and DOS alongside Windows 7. Ubuntu by coparison installed super easily via WUBI.

The last time it broke, I couldn't get repair to fix it automatically or get EasyBCD to run, so I just decided to install another copy of W7 in the partition I was playing with the other OSes and THAT fixed the original partition.

(Boy, I hate Windows :D )

(*) I had to support some old PCI hardware, so none of my Macs would do and I wasn't about to buy a Mac Pro for this project when a $250 E5400 PC would work just fine.

B
 
Yeah, oddly enough I was using TI2010 so something is still screwy but it takes several (and by several I mean many) tries of bootrec and bootsec to get things to work so maybe that is what did it in the end. It was a real pain in the ass. He probably will want to upgrade to 7 now so I suspect I will have booting fun with this machine again soon.
 
Well hopefully it was just a fluke of the FUBAR partition table to begin with. One can hope right?

B
 
flopticalcube said:
At least if I see this again, I'll have an action plan and I won't sweat so much (not a pretty sight).
Click to expand...

You have far more patience than I would have had ;)

Woof, Woof - Dawg
pawprint.gif
 
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