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Sebastien · Mar 18, 2007, 11:57 PM

Hey all,

When trying to fix a BootCamp Windows install Parallels had messed up, when trying to reinstall Windows on it I ended up inadvertently corrupting the partition map on my Intel iMac (at least I think that's what happenned).

I've tried several recovery tools, such as TechTool Deluxe, Diskwarrior, etc. but the only one worth its price it seems is Data Rescue II, since it's the only one that still 'sees' my partition even though the Mac won't mount it from the disk.

While I could use DataRescue II to recover what I need, and just do a reinstall, to save time I'd rather simply (if there's such a thing) restore/fix/repair that partition map so that I can just repair the directory structure. I've got a clone of the drive to play around with, and I was thinking just partitioning that drive again and trying to restore it that way, but I'm not sure if that would work.

Another idea I had was to recreate the partition map directly, but I'm not sure if there's any GUID editors out there (all the tools I've seen are for the PPC-type Apple Partition Maps)

Any ideas on what tools/methods I could try, before I reformat/reinstall?

Thx

ghporter · Mar 19, 2007, 07:54 AM

Have you tried booting from your OS X install disc and using Disk Utility to fix it? It's free and it couldn't hurt, especially if you have a clone of the drive to work with.

Sebastien · Mar 19, 2007, 08:33 AM

Yep, but since the drive doesn't mount, Disk Utility doesn't see it at all, so can't do anything with it (besides reinitializing the disk). Besides, I think DU is quite limited in its ability to do repairs anyways.

ghporter · Mar 19, 2007, 08:00 PM

I missed the "doesn't mount at all" part.

I have a few tricks and tools that work under Windows, but none for OS X (other than Disk Utility).

There are Linux tools around that should be able to do the trick. Start with a "live CD" Linux distro and add the appropriate tool-you'll just boot off the CD and run the tool as appropriate. Check starting here for tools.

Gotta love Linux for fixing things! Many of my "recover this PC because the user thought he was a genius and was wrong" tools are Linux based (and "live CD" based as well) because you don't need to mess with USING the NTFS or FAT32 file system to fix it.

Sebastien · Mar 19, 2007, 10:05 PM

Originally Posted by ghporter

I missed the "doesn't mount at all" part.

I have a few tricks and tools that work under Windows, but none for OS X (other than Disk Utility).

There are Linux tools around that should be able to do the trick. Start with a "live CD" Linux distro and add the appropriate tool-you'll just boot off the CD and run the tool as appropriate. Check starting here for tools.

Gotta love Linux for fixing things! Many of my "recover this PC because the user thought he was a genius and was wrong" tools are Linux based (and "live CD" based as well) because you don't need to mess with USING the NTFS or FAT32 file system to fix it.

Hi,

Thanks for the link - I might give it a try if I can get another Windows machine working.

I did try a Linux recovery tool cd ('Ultimate boot cd' I think), but that had the nasty problem of doubling every letter I typed, so I couldn't do anything with it...

Sebastien · Mar 19, 2007, 10:06 PM

If anyone has BootCamp installed, I'd be interested to see what the output of 'gpt -r show /disk0' shows on their system. Thanks

hookem2oo7 · Mar 19, 2007, 11:03 PM

i used a series of terminal commands to save my HFS partition when I tried to resize my windows partition with drive genius and it failed. It involved using fdisk to get the geometry of the HFS partition and overwriting the corrupt GPT table with the correct geometries with the gpt utility.

Sebastien · Mar 21, 2007, 03:54 PM

Did you run it from the XP install disk?

Steve-M · Mar 22, 2007, 12:03 AM

Originally Posted by hookem2oo7

i used a series of terminal commands to save my HFS partition when I tried to resize my windows partition with drive genius and it failed. It involved using fdisk to get the geometry of the HFS partition and overwriting the corrupt GPT table with the correct geometries with the gpt utility.

I sure wish you'd gone into more detail about what you did to restore your partition map. I'm in the same boat as you--Drive Genius hosed my partition map, and I have an supposedly empty volume. If I could just point the map back at where my volume is I could get my data back. I'll dive into the terminal and see what I can learn.

Sebastien · Mar 25, 2007, 01:33 AM

Originally Posted by hookem2oo7

i used a series of terminal commands to save my HFS partition when I tried to resize my windows partition with drive genius and it failed. It involved using fdisk to get the geometry of the HFS partition and overwriting the corrupt GPT table with the correct geometries with the gpt utility.

I now see that fdisk is part of the OS (I assumed you were talking about the DOS version), though it doesn't recognize anything on the drive.

I did try a Linux recovery CD (INSERT - http://www.inside-security.de/insert_en.html) that included a partition utility that did see the original partitions on the drive, and was able to get the start, end and size sectors for each one. In the morning I'll try to recreate the partition map using gpt from the info I got.

I also tried a program called Stellar Phoenix, which did seem to find everything (at least according to the demo that is), but @ $200USD, it's too darn expensive, especially since I don't know for sure if it could really recover everything, since the demo doesn't allow any sort of recovery to test its effectiveness.

I'll report back tomorrow on my results.