msftres - a Gparted nightmare without solution?

[Detosx]

I have googled the behind off this one and not found an answer. I know it's a common enough problem and about half a year ago I had the same problem and I think found a Terminal workaround but... can't find it, now.

 

I have three - pardon me four - partitions on my laptop's GUID partitioned hard drive. EFI MBR/Vista/Leopard/Leopard. I sacrificed that last partition to put XP on for the sole reason that there was no way to update my bios through Vista. Having updated the bios, I erased the NTFS partition in gparted and put it back to FAT32. In Disk Utility I tried to format that as HFS+ Journalled. No joy. The partition was greyed out and not mountable. I went back into Gparted and found that the partition was flagged as 'msftres'.

 

There is no way to change it. Apparently this is an unintended Gparted boobytrap. I tried marking said partition as boot, but no joy in Disk Utility. Tried flagging it as an HP service partition. Didn't work. I'm really hacked off because XP seems to have damaged Vista's boot. I tried to repair the latter with Vista DVD but it couldn't repair it, even with Vista flagged as boot.

 

Any suggestions very welcome! Otherwise the moral is, don't use Gparted on your hard dive post originally setting it up with it.

[Detosx]

I am still searching for an answer to this one. Anyone else know of a workaround?

[Gophish]

Same here, If you find the solution to this problem please let me know!

Thanks...

[Detosx]

Same here, If you find the solution to this problem please let me know!

Thanks...

Hi Gophish, google was a dismal let down, for once, and I thought I was going to have to start over. Not a big deal if you have Leo on an external drive and can migrate your applications with migration assistant but... still. Through sheer persistence and experimentation, here is a copy of what worked for me. It sounds a little bonkers in places but I have GUID and Disk Utility flakey at times, in the same way Leo sometimes boots up on my Acer 4720z and sometimes just freezes at once on the Apple on gray boot screen. Best of luck. Report back

 

-----------

 

As people are likely to google their way to this one and it's not something I have seen answered, here is the only working solution that I was able to come up with, through trial and error.

 

My drive is formated as GUID but I think the same would apply even were it not.

 

For whatever reason, you had to scrap your second HFS+ partition with iATKOS or whatever on it, to put XP on it to do a bios update that couldn't be done through Vista, or you didn't have a USB dongle, whatever... Once done, you went back into good old gparted and formated the partition as FAT32 so that Disk Utility could then see it to format it to HFS+/Mac journaled. You notice that having formated, the partition's flag is now set to 'msftres' and you can't deselect it, not even setting the flag to boot works, even though 'msftres' appears then to be deselected. Disk Utility isn't going to like your 'msftres' FAT32 partition, at all... the partition hard drive icon will appear grayed out in Disk Utility. You can right click on it and try and get it to mount as suggested elsewhere, but it won't.

 

Here, then, is what I did. Convoluted but it has worked for me and two others in the same position.

 

In Disk Utility I clicked not on the partition in question but on the whole hard drive. I then clicked on Partition. I then carefully selected the partition in question and clicked on the minus symbol. I then clicked on Apply. No error messages. I then went to the Erase tab. The partition still won't mount and when erasing you can't name it but it does otherwise seem to erase/format to Mac, as you will see when you boot into gparted, in this case via the live CD of Ubuntu 8.04. Use it's version of gparted 0.3.5. The HFS+ partition still shows as msftres but you can get rid of that flag, now!!

 

You need then to boot up iATKOS or what have you, go to Disk Utility. Erase the said partition as Mac Journalled again (you might be able to avoid this step and simply carry on with the installer, or... your partition might show as a file or folder icon, rather than the expected hard drive icon, I have no idea why but I once tried to install on such and the installer crapped out three quarters of the way in) . It won't let you erase it, but try and do so. Then right click on the said partition and select Mount. This time it will mount, as it should. You can erase it again and the installer will recognize it as an icon identified partition rather than a folder/file icon.

 

Convoluted and your degree of phaffing around may vary but it did work for me.

 

Now, if I can just rescue the Vista partition from whatever installing XP did... Repair on the Vista DVD doesn't work. Reinstalling iATKOS, or whatever, is a doddle, whereas Vista...

[1)u5t7]

if anyone is still looking for a work around for this dilemma, i was able to salvage the space but none of the data however, without a backup. in g-parted delete the partition in question, add new partition in its place and select unformatted. then in osx it can be formatted to hfs+ or fat32. hope this helps someone out of a jam.