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Bootcamp install went bad.


asterj
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Hi all,

 

I tried to setup bootcamp on my intel core 2 duo iMac and things went horribly wrong. My problem seems similar to this topic http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/node/227 but things aren't going well. I had bootcamp partition my 1 terabyte harddrive as 900mb for OSX and 100mb for windows. I used an old copy of windows XP I had thinking the install would go fast. As part of the setup it had to initialize the disk and I let it proceed thinking it was operating only on the 100mb partition.

 

After it finished installing it had to restart the computer. On restart it went into the windows xp installation again and wanted to init the disk again, which I didnt let it do. I thought I that I needed to eject the disk before restarting to prevent this.

 

On this restart without the disk it went to a black screen with a blinking cursor and stopped. Thinking my XP install was bad I rebooted again holding down option to get back into OSX. I still hit the black screen so I rebooted into the OS X install disk and opened up disk util.

 

To my horror it didn't recognize any partition on the disk. It seems that XP corrupted my partition table in some way. Doing some research online I saw that TestDisk seems to be good at fixing partition tables so I download that onto a USB stick and ran it via the Terminal. The results of its scan are very strange and disheartening.

 

imgur.com/a/prYcz (sorry for the blur I took screenshots with my camera)

 

I see the EFI partition which I understand now to be a hidden system partition but was only expecting two more partitions: the HFS and a Windows partition. Somehow I have 5 partitions, that don't even fully span the drive, FAT, HFS HFS, FAT, HFS. Thinking this was some bootcamp voodoo I let testdisk write the partition table and rebooted but the large 900GB partition wouldn't mount. I could look into the other HFS partition but it seemed to be an empty install of OSX? Perhaps it was a debug install while the machine was in the factory?

 

In OSX Install's Disk Utility I couldn't repair or verify the large HFS volume. I used pdisk to clear the partition table and repeated my steps but had no luck and got depressed.

 

What exactly should my partition table look like? How many partitions should there be? Only 3 right? I don't care about that 100GB partition bootcamp set up but want to get back the 900GB HFS one. Is there a way to write the table manually and if so what should the partition information look like?

 

Have I been destroying my data this whole time? I am not sure what XP did to my disk but I want to get my data back. I have some of the stuff backed up I think but if I could just pull like 20-30 megs of the data off I'd feel alright about reformatting to a clean install.

 

If restoring my partition is not possible what is the best way to recover data? I have been doing many many hours of research and am in desperate need of expert guidance.

 

If you've read everything this far you deserve a cookie. Please eat one before writing a reply and thank you!

 

-Ast

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If things can go wrong, things will definitely go wrong.

 

According to this link initialized disk = formatted disk. So there is a possibility that the disk was formatted (if I understand your description correctly).

 

If it's not, try using this information to recover partition table.

 

In general a data can be recovered even from a formatted disk (unless it was erased securely on purpose which is obviously not the case). Though it may be complicated thing to do.

 

What exactly should my partition table look like?
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