Bootcamp Woes...Should be easy for you pros

[robzilla56]

Hi all,

I'm new to the forum but I know i'm in the right place. I will walk you through what I did to get in this mess as clearly as possible.

1) I have a 500GB Intel Macbook Pro. I had bootcamp running with one large Mac Partition and One 80GB Windows 7 Partition.

2) I tried to resize my Mac Partition to add some space to my windows. This was a mistake. The blank space I created using the mac disk utility pushed my bootcamp partition to a different location and I could not longer boot the windows side.

3) Applecare told me I was screwed and I lost all the data and I should reformat everything and start over. Well they lied and I was able to use gdisk in osx to move my windows partition. Don't ask me exactly how I did this, I followed an example on an apple forum and WINDOWS CAME BACK! So applecare are liers.... now in lies the problem

4) Windows partition now boots fine but I lost my Mac side. I've tried a partition recovery tool and it finds the files but I need a recovery image so I can fully recover the Mac and all its programs and all its files. So I can only look at things in windows 7. The windows 7 disk utility claims that the large chunk of the HD that was MAC is empty. But I know this is not the case. It must just be looking in the wrong place.

5) I have a full backup of my windows disc image now so I can restore it if I screw it up now. But I've got to get the mac os side running even if its just to make a recovery backup so I can keep all my applications and files.

6) TestDisk led me here! I think this is the only tool in windows 7 that can really tell me whats going on.

Test Disk Capture

TestDisk_Capture.JPG (78.41 KiB) Viewed 6453 times

I've read through several examples and I'm far from an expert here so I need someones help. I'm not even sure what this is telling me but it looks like wayyy more partitions or sections than I expected. I'm confuzed that they all are labeled with a P. I'm confuzed why there are three NO-Name sections. I believe the section after the EFI is my 230GB mac side with my files. However I can't view the files within any of the mac HFS.

Please help I will love you forever. I just need the mac side to boot one more time so I can make a recovery backup image then I'm wiping my whole hard drive and starting over.

Thanks in advance.

Robbie

[dragonfly41]

First a caveat. I have no experience in recovering Mac data using testdisk.

But as just one option I would consider creating a Ubuntu (linux) Live CD which you can boot up from CD (or USB) and then recover data in either your internal or external drives. Forensic tools in Ubuntu include testdisk (which today you're running in your Windows).

More reading here .. including reference to testdisk.

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/15761/re ... u-live-cd/

Note that Ubuntu might come with an earlier version of testdisk but you can upgrade to the latest testdisk version.

There might be a Windows tool which can recover Mac but I haven't searched for one.

[Later Edit]

I found these examples in a quick search .. I would try running stellarinfo (free trial) in Windows to see if your Mac files can be recognised .. then take it from there (either continue usin TestDisk, or failing that just purchase a Stellar licence).

http://www.stellarinfo.com/mac-data-rec ... indows.htm

http://www.binarybiz.com/vlab/recover-m ... ndows.html



[Correction]

Of course .. you're running Windows on Mac so the above Windows tools probably might not apply .. sorry if that's a red herring.

Stick with live CD and use gparted to inspect your partitions. Look to see if there is a boot flag in the bootable Mac partition.

[robzilla56]

Thank you Dragon Fly

I actually Did find Boot_Disc_Repair that uses Debian Linux to try and diagnosis the drive problem. But it won't correct it because it found an EFI...which I believe is the firmware for the mac ox loading.

But I was able to take some pictures of the Boot_Disc_Repair and it has some really really good info about my disc. Still doesn't help me much as I'm not used to interpreting this stuff. But hopefully it will make some sense to you. All I know Is I think its all still there its just that its looking in the wrong place to boot or I messed up the MBR with gdisc but hopefully you can give me some more advice after viewing these screens...

And I'm looking into Steller

Heres the PICS

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[robzilla56]

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[robzilla56]

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[robzilla56]

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[dragonfly41]

Boot repair allows you to paste the log into pastebin .. just as a URL.
See second button in screenshot below.
Saves adding all these images and you have a useful online record of your partitions.

I'll have a look at the images bearing in mind I'm not (today) a Mac user.

[Later edit]

Found these articles which might help if you can get into command line to repair bootcamp MBR.

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?s ... 1185717745
http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/hybrid.html
http://refit.sourceforge.net/

[dragonfly41]

Afterthoughts ..
Reading again .. this last line on your last screenshot image seems to offer some clue ..

dmesg | grep EFI

BIOS is EFI-compatible but it is not setup in EFI-mode for this live session

reading here ..

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFIBooting

...

as I understand a MacBook Pro is 64 bit architecture but can be booted up as 32 bit or 64 bit?

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/40 ... 0&tstart=0

Perhaps you need to use a 64 bit Live CD which is EFI-compatible ?

then install boot-repair from the Live CD session.

sudo apt-get install boot-repair

then just run boot-repair

...

Again I'm just guessing with MacBook Pro.