NTFS Partition Shows Up as HFS+

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.

 

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 )
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 )

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 )

 

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.

 

At least if I see this again, I'll have an action plan and I won't sweat so much (not a pretty sight).

 

ABSOLUTELY!

I never liked the sys admin side of things but I have 3 teenage kids and am the neighborhood tech goto guy so....

 

Oh I have! All three use iMacs. This was a neighbor's machine. Some people just refuse to change although he has an OSX partition now so soon his transformation will be complete.