FIXED: Accidently screwed up a working GUID HD & changed it to MBR

[zoomie]

I seriously screwed up a perfectly good working Leopard system.

 

I have a Leopard 10.5.5 system installed on a SATA drive with a single GUID partition. The system also had an additional SATA drive with a single GUID partition.

 

I just added a spare IDE drive to my system, with the intent of installing Ubuntu on it. I attempted to partition that IDE drive with Partition Magic. My mistake was not disconnecting my Leopard drives before attempting to partition the IDE drive. I think Partition Magic changed the partitioning scheme of my SATA drives from GUID to MBR. Now the Leopard install does not boot....all I get is the infamous "waiting for root device" error message.

 

I booted to a Leopard install on a USB drive and Disk Utility is unable to mount the partition of my screwed up drive. Disk Utility now shows the drive as MBR instead of GUID. Disk Warrior also didn't recognize the drive.

 

My theory is that the data on the actual partition is still intact...its just the partition map or boot sectors are screwed up.

 

From both Leopard and Ubuntu command lines, I've tried using dd to copy the partition to another hard drive that was partitioned as a single GUID partition. That didn't work...when dd was done copying the partition to the new drive, the new drive also changed from GUID to MBR. And the copied drive was also unrecognized my OSX.

 

Does anyone have any ideas?

[zoomie]

Ok...on another thread, I found a solution. Booting with Parted Magic 3.3, a Linux based LiveCD, I used a a program called Test Disk which analyses a hard drive and attempts to recover lost partitions.

 

Whew!!!!!