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OSX86 HD cant be mounted anymore in OSX, OSX shows MBR instead of GUID. *pls read*


OSXLion
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Hi,

 

for the second time now my OSX86 installation suddenly got destroid for unknown reason. And I just had everything set up perfectly... I have a 3 OS setup (OSX86, Vista, XP) but every OS has it very own Harddrive. I used Kalyways with GUID partitioning, updated to 10.5.2 and everything worked just fine.

 

However, after using Windows I suddenly (and for the second time allready) can not start OSX86 anymore. It starts booting up, I can see the Apple and the spinning circle but then the harddisks spin down and I get an error sign. When booting in verbose mode everything seems to work fine until suddenly and at the very end of the booting prozess it states:

 

Still wating for root device

Still wating for root device

Can not mount root device

 

I connected the OSX86 HD via an USB to my MacBook to check it. And -it can not be mounted in OSX. But it gets even better: Disk utility says that the disk has a MBR Partitioning table, not in GUID anymore. I can not believe it. I can neither repair nor check the drive. Everything in First Aid is greyed out.

 

I went back to Windows, connected my OSX86 drive. MacDrive has no problem whatsoever to mount the drive. I can access all data. Everything seems to be fine - and MacDrive shows the drive as an GPT (=GUID) drive!

 

Strange, hu?

 

Now first of all I would of course love to fix that. Is there any way to fix the partitioning table so that it shows corectly in OSX as GUID again and can be mounted w/o loosing all my data and settings and starting all over again?

 

And I want to find out what is causing this error. I don't want this to happen again!

 

I was using Partition Magic 8 in Windows, resizing another Windows Harddrive - of course I did not touch the OSX Drive. and I reinstalled Vista both times it happens. My first guess is that Partition Magic caused the Problem even when I did not touch the OSX86 drive with it. It seems PM 8 can not handle GUID/GPT drives at all. But so far I can not tell for shure what really caused the problem.

 

Anyone ever had this kind of problem? Any solutions?

 

Thank you very very much!

 

Best

Lion

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This is probably because the windows installations are on MBR partitions. The only thing I can recommend is repairing disk permissions from disk utility in the OS X install DVD. Someone might be able to explain this further.

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This is probably because the windows installations are on MBR partitions. The only thing I can recommend is repairing disk permissions from disk utility in the OS X install DVD. Someone might be able to explain this further.

 

Hi,

 

thanks for your answer.

 

However, the Windows installations are on different harddisks. They should not affect OSX86 at all.

 

And unfortunately Disk Utility does not allow to do anything with this disk anymore. The disk shows up as ab MBR disk and I can neither mount nor repair or check the disk. I tried this using another (real) Mac.

 

Best

Lion

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Hi,

 

I tried to copy all files to another drive in Windows using MacDrive. That did not work very well...

 

Now I used Data Rescue II. The tool had no problem to find the faulty partition and all files on it and in spite if disk utility it even showed the correct partition name.

 

So over night I will copy all my files to a second hard disk, tomorrow I will try if it can boot after installing PC EFI to it. We'll see...

 

Best

Lion

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  • 7 months later...

Well case solved !!!! Amazing Parted Magic 3 to the rescue.

 

1. Removed all external drives (USB and Firewire).

2. Disconnected all internal SATA drives but the one with OSX on the first partition. The other partition had some audio files in it.

3. Booted from CD (Parted Magic 3 - a bootable linux prog, google it).

4. Using Disk Edit and fiddling a bit about, I managed to restore my 2 partitions OSX and data.

 

Hooray .... !

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  • 4 weeks later...
Well case solved !!!! Amazing Parted Magic 3 to the rescue.

 

1. Removed all external drives (USB and Firewire).

2. Disconnected all internal SATA drives but the one with OSX on the first partition. The other partition had some audio files in it.

3. Booted from CD (Parted Magic 3 - a bootable linux prog, google it).

4. Using Disk Edit and fiddling a bit about, I managed to restore my 2 partitions OSX and data.

 

Hooray .... !

 

Can you please be more specific when you say you were "fiddling a bit about" with Disk Edit? I have the same problem when I used PM8. I booted Parted Magic 3.3, but I couldn't find "Disk Edit" in the GUI...is it a command line program?

 

EDIT: Nevermind...I checked again, and used a program in Parted Magic 3.3 called Test Disk. It fixed my problem.

 

Thanks,

Zoomie

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