[Gunbucker]

Hi,

I've got a rather peculiar problem, a partition I have no control over, after messing around with bootcamp, xp, and vista.

It started with my bootcamp installation of XP. Started off fine. But one day, instead of XP starting up upon selection, a black screen (by Windows) that asks me to select which profile of XP showed up, with the keyboard freezing!

So I thought I'd install Vista over it, and hopefully the problem would go away. Well, during the Vista install screens, it allowed me to remove the problematic partition. BUT, now, the partition is in limbo, literally, as you can see:



My question is, how do I free up that partition in limbo, and NON-DESTRUCTIVELY resize the primary partition to the full space of the hard disk?

I tried using diskutil in single user mode with the resizeVolume verb, but it's complaining that the new size exceeds the total hard disk size. I suspect diskutil too cannot see the limbo partition.

Need your help folks!

Thanks!

[ghporter]

Free up the old BC partition using the Boot Camp Utility (in Applications/Utilities) to restore the drive to a single partition. Now, with the drive back to its OS X origins, you can start over if you wish. I'd run Disk Utility from the OS X DVD to make sure nothing's gotten messed up, but if you really need to work on the drive, Boot Camp will tell you.

You CANNOT undo a Boot Camp partition with Disk Utility, because DU can't manage that type of partition.

[Gunbucker]

Doesn't work, coz the Bootcamp Assistant does not see the "Free Space" partition at all.

Any ideas?

[Gunbucker]

Anyone?

[ghporter]

If neither Boot Camp nor Disk Utility (when you boot from the hard drive) can alter this free space section, you need to try booting from your OS X disc and running Disk Utility (in the Tools menu) that way. Otherwise, I think you're going to have to back up your stuff and start over with OS X.