So I recently upgraded to Mavricks and before upgrading I had my Mac partition and Windows partition. When I first created my Windows partition I allocated 50GB of space for it. Later I realized that I need more space but I did not want to delete everything on my Windows partition and start over so I decided to resize down my Mac partition using disk utility and then increase my Windows partition using a third party app. After doing this I was successful and had 101GB allocated to Windows and the rest allocated to my Mac OS. In the disk utility I did notice that it was not recognizing the windows partition correctly but I didn't really care about that. So after the upgrade my Windows partition disappeared and I have been trying to get it back. I tried using gdisk but I ended up messing up my MBR and didn't find any OS when I booted my Mac and held the options key down. Fortunately I was able to fix that by loading through a flash drive running Ubuntu and used testdisk to fix the partition table. I was unable to use it to fix my Windows partition. When ever I go to write my windows partition it just overwrites it and my Mac OS disappears but my Windows OS appears but can't boot. I get a message saying no OS found. Right now I currently have my Mac partition restore and working fine but my windows partition is still missing. I would like help on this. Thanks.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Problem with windows partition after upgrading to Mavricks
- Thread starter o2themar
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Third party partition managers almost never work on OSX.
Delete the windows partition and try again using bootcamp.
Delete the windows partition and try again using bootcamp.
Thanks for replying. That is what I am trying to avoid. My windows partition is still there but it is missing in the diskutil. The reason why I know its still there is because I saw it when I was playing around with test disk. I was just scared to take further action without getting some guidance on this.
----------
Also if anyone can help guide me through creating a hybird MBR here is the link http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/hybrid.html
What I don't know if doing this would fix my windows MBR or overwrite something and mess up OSX.
----------
Also if anyone can help guide me through creating a hybird MBR here is the link http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/hybrid.html
What I don't know if doing this would fix my windows MBR or overwrite something and mess up OSX.
When you booted from Ubuntu was the Windows partition visible using fdisk or parted?
If yes, could you mount it?
If yes, could you mount it?
This is the output I get when I run sudo fdisk /dev/rdisk0 where disk0 is my main disk
Disk: /dev/rdisk0 geometry: 60801/255/63 [976773168 sectors]
Signature: 0xAA55
Starting Ending
#: id cyl hd sec - cyl hd sec [ start - size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1: EE 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 1 - 976773167] <Unknown ID>
2: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused
3: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused
4: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused
Disk: /dev/rdisk0 geometry: 60801/255/63 [976773168 sectors]
Signature: 0xAA55
Starting Ending
#: id cyl hd sec - cyl hd sec [ start - size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1: EE 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 1 - 976773167] <Unknown ID>
2: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused
3: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused
4: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused
Use gptsync for osx to create the hybrid MBR. http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/177505-enhanced-gptsync-tool/ It's the same tool as Ubuntu's except you can do it from osx. Just open the terminal and do sudo gptsync /dev/disk0. By the looks of your fdisk output the MBR is being read incorrectly.
No that didn't work. I wrote the recommended partition table using gptsync and restarted my computer and still didn't see windows when I held down the options key. One thing I think you should look at is the results that I got from using fdisk -l running Ubuntu. Its attached below.
Attachments
Also this is the output after using gptsync and running fdisk in mac terminal.
Disk: /dev/disk0 geometry: 60801/255/63 [976773168 sectors]
Signature: 0xAA55
Starting Ending
#: id cyl hd sec - cyl hd sec [ start - size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1: EE 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 1 - 409639] <Unknown ID>
2: AF 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 409640 - 776880976] HFS+
3: EE 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 777290616 - 199482552] <Unknown ID>
4: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused
Disk: /dev/disk0 geometry: 60801/255/63 [976773168 sectors]
Signature: 0xAA55
Starting Ending
#: id cyl hd sec - cyl hd sec [ start - size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1: EE 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 1 - 409639] <Unknown ID>
2: AF 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 409640 - 776880976] HFS+
3: EE 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 777290616 - 199482552] <Unknown ID>
4: 00 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 [ 0 - 0] unused
That's really odd. I'm kind of thinking it's beyond repair, unfortunately I've had this same type of thing happen to me before as well and I wasnt able to fix it. I take it Ubuntu can't see the drive to get your files off of it?
The files aren't important. I didn't really have much. All the files I had were projects that I have saved in the cloud so they can be easily retrieved. My concern is getting windows working so I don't have to reinstall all the programs I have. Its a pain and also I don't know if I would be able to reinstall the windows partition without first formatting my Mac hard drive and reinstalling Mavricks. The issue I have with that is I have a 1.5TB external hard drive that I have data saved on from a windows computer and I am not really interested in going out and buying another external hard drive just to back up my Mac drive. Also I can't use the 1.5TB drive because it would need to be formatted before being used to backup data from my mac. Anyways if anyone can help me get this fixed I would really appreciate it. I feel like this would help out a lot of people who may have the same problem and don't want to go through the burden of reinstalling their windows partition.
If you use Bootcamp any subsequent partition resizing is unsupported. This may well result in mismatched mbr/gpt partition tables.
The system may remain usable and everything may seem fine.
However, if subsequently an OSX installer is run it will try to repair the mbr/gpt entries and it will get one or more wrong.
The system has most likely lost the start and/or end sector of your Bootcamp partition. Consequently it can't boot it.
It may be possible to repair it but it may be a better option to wipe the disc and start again (getting partition sizes correct this time - I had to).
There are posts on here by murphychris which explain what possible remedies there are. I suggest you have a search for those and see what you think.
The system may remain usable and everything may seem fine.
However, if subsequently an OSX installer is run it will try to repair the mbr/gpt entries and it will get one or more wrong.
The system has most likely lost the start and/or end sector of your Bootcamp partition. Consequently it can't boot it.
It may be possible to repair it but it may be a better option to wipe the disc and start again (getting partition sizes correct this time - I had to).
There are posts on here by murphychris which explain what possible remedies there are. I suggest you have a search for those and see what you think.
Yeah I feel your pain, reinstalling windows is a pita since there's no migration assistant or anything like that. You shouldn't have to reinstall mavericks, but if you are worried about it you can use something like carbon copy cloner to make a disk image of your OS X partition, you can keep the disk image on an NTFS partition no problem provided you can write to it (you need ntfs-3g for that if you don't already have it). I hope that's helpful.