thebeast Posted April 1, 2011 Share Posted April 1, 2011 I'd set up a triple boot on my system with Snow Leopard as the primary OS, Windows 7 as secondary, and Ubuntu as tertiary. This worked fine for a number of months, but my Windows partition has since disappeared in both Mac Disk Utility, and the Chameleon boot menu. What's strange is that all the partitions still look fine if I boot into Ubuntu and use GParted to view them. See screenshots below. Any ideas what's going on here? I suspect it may be something to do with the GPT/MBR relationship, but I'm not entirely sure. If it helps, here is my partition table from fdisk in the Mac - I presume this is set up so that the MBR isn't used, and the whole disk is configured as one partition: Disk: /dev/disk1 geometry: -1539437/4/63 [-387938128 sectors] Offset: 0 Signature: 0xAA55 Starting Ending #: id cyl hd sec - cyl hd sec [ start - size] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1: EE 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 1 - -387938129] <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 Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mac8a Posted April 3, 2011 Share Posted April 3, 2011 I'd set up a triple boot on my system with Snow Leopard as the primary OS, Windows 7 as secondary, and Ubuntu as tertiary. This worked fine for a number of months, but my Windows partition has since disappeared in both Mac Disk Utility, and the Chameleon boot menu. What's strange is that all the partitions still look fine if I boot into Ubuntu and use GParted to view them. See screenshots below. Any ideas what's going on here? I suspect it may be something to do with the GPT/MBR relationship, but I'm not entirely sure. If it helps, here is my partition table from fdisk in the Mac - I presume this is set up so that the MBR isn't used, and the whole disk is configured as one partition: Disk: /dev/disk1 geometry: -1539437/4/63 [-387938128 sectors] Offset: 0 Signature: 0xAA55 Starting Ending #: id cyl hd sec - cyl hd sec [ start - size] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1: EE 1023 254 63 - 1023 254 63 [ 1 - -387938129] <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 Thanks I have a MSI Wind U100 netbook setup to triple boot Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.7, Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate Edition, and Linux Mint 9. Here is how I got mine working ... After following along the guides here... http://www.insanelywind.com/forum/viewtopi...?f=17&t=453 and here... http://lifehacker.com/#!5698205/how-to...ndows-and-linux I got everything working and it was working well for a while, till I needed to update my Windows 7 with Service Pack 1 and it wouldn't work due to the fact that Service Pack 1 couldn't access the desired partition to make modifications as Windows wasn't set as the boot partition. So I decided that I could just flip the boot flag to the Windows Partition, make the necessary adjustments and switch it back, simple enough right? WRONG! Once I switched the boot flag back to Mac it corrupted the Partition Scheme Table, i.e. Windows No Longer Booted because it wanted to be the "Active Partition", but Mac and Linux were still accessible. To fix all this mess, I booted into Linux and re ran gptsync and thus Windows was working again but now Mac and Linux weren't upon reboot. So I loaded up Windows 7 and had to use WINDOWS' "Diskpart"; it vitally crucial to use Windows' own Partition Manager to set Mac OS X's partition as the "boot" partition. Again, let me reemphasize that ... USE MICROSOFT'S DISKPART TO SET MAC OS X's PARTITION AS BOOTABLE, gparted and fdisk WILL NOT WORK! I'm under the suspicion that it has something to do with tricking Windows into believing it's still the Boot Partition because "Your In It!" or perhaps some difference in "Active Partition Flag" and "Boot Partition Flag". In any case, after this all was working again upon reboot. I hope this helps, It saved my little machine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thebeast Posted April 3, 2011 Author Share Posted April 3, 2011 OK thanks I'll see if I can do something similar on my system. My main concern is that I can't get back into Mac, as that's what I use 99% of the time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mac8a Posted April 4, 2011 Share Posted April 4, 2011 OK thanks I'll see if I can do something similar on my system. My main concern is that I can't get back into Mac, as that's what I use 99% of the time. Same here, I've become a Mac fiend! I use Mac all the time now. Mac OS X Snow Leopard is my primary OS and the first partition on my system, plus I'm a happy iPad owner. I've become obsessed with all things Apple. Getting back in to Mac was my primary concern as well. It's what mattered most to me. As long as you don't make modifications to the partitions other than to flag them or sync them with gptsync; no formats, no partition resizing or moving, you should be able to recover and get back. The guides I mentioned before helped a lot in my thought process of recovery, especially the lifehacker one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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