trying to salvage BootCamp boogered by Recovery HD

[Sumleilmus]

My Bootcamp installation of Windows is broken or at least mislocated. A program, probably Carbon Copy Cloner, objected to the fully functional drive, which had bootable partitions for Lion_Mountain, Leopard_Snow, and WNDWS832 (Win8 32bit), and offered to give it a Recovery HD slice. Thus I ended up with the following:

$ diskutil list
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk1
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Lion_Mountain         412.3 GB   disk1s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             784.2 MB   disk1s3
   4:                  Apple_HFS Leopard_Snow        40.3 GB    disk1s4
   5:       Microsoft Basic Data WNDWS832        45.6 GB    disk1s5

The Windows volume will still boot as a virtual machine using Virtual Box.

System Preferences>Startup Disk sees the Windows volume. Alas, when it is chosen as the startup disk the boot fails with a Win8 error message of “no bootable Windows installation.”

I think the volume might work again if I can restore it so it looks like this, so that Bootcamp installation will again be in slice 4 where it was very happy:

/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk1
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Lion_Mountain         412.3 GB   disk1s2
   3:                  Apple_HFS Leopard_Snow        40.3 GB disk1s3
   4:                  Microsoft Basic Data WNDWS832        45.6 GB   disk1s4

I read the man pages for diskutil, I think with care, but I am inexperienced in its use. I have backed up the contents of each volume on the disk.

I think what I want to do is first

     diskutil eraseVolume JHFS+ UntitledJHFS /Volumes/Apple_Boot Recovery HD

followed by

     diskutil mergePartitions JHFS+ Lion_Mountain disk1s2 disk1s3

Does that look correct?

[DeltaMac]

Have you tried to repair the Windows 8 partition? That may then let Windows boot without needing to change your other partitions
http://windows7themes.net/disaster-r...s-missing.html
You do need your Windows 8 installer disk (or you might have a USB stick with your Win8 install?) The instructions assume that you need to set BIOS, etc, for the installer disk to boot. All you need to do on your Mac is hold the C, same as other bootable optical disks on a Mac. Or, Option-boot screen to choose the Win8 installer. Follow the repair instructions, which is pretty quick just to fix the mbr, and (I suppose) also should get the bootmgr correctly installed.
As far as I know, you shouldn't need to do anything to the ML Recovery HD partition. It takes hardly any space on your hard drive...

[Sumleilmus]

The partition in question is a Windows 7. I blundered above, and I don't think I can edit the post (O, moderators, save this oaf…)

This post in another site talks about the "Hybrid MBR" set up that worked for me before.

I have high hopes for unboogering it, perhaps unwarrated, but I know that without that Recovery HD volume, it worked great.

The Win 7 will boot as a virtual machine. That's what makes me think its problems are its neighbors and its location, not its qualities.

Ha, but my fat fingers don't know Win 8 from Win 7…

[agentx]

I would use Winclone to backup a bootcamp partition to disk image.
There will be fun and games getting this working but Windows boot repair or playing with bootmgr.dll
will correct the booting issue as it will have the incorrect partition in this config as moved from 5 to 4.

This might point you in right direction
https://discussions.apple.com/thread...art=0&tstart=0

[Sumleilmus]

agentx,

I've enjoyed Winclone now for yet awhile. That thread you cite is paydirt, a pure seam of gold.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread...art=0&tstart=0

I will hop on to that. Hiyo, gdisk awayyyyyyy

[agentx]

You know windows will only boot off a partition numbered 1-4 don't you ? That is why it will not boot on Partition 5.
You should be able to keep partition map in tact and format the Snow and Windows partitions and restore from clones/backups putting windows on 4 and snow on 5.

[agentx]

You could also remove the recovery partition. Which would also change the partition numbers. I urge everyone to buy a nice fast USB flash drive and clone the InstallESD.dmg from inside Install Mac OS X.app. This gives you recovery options and a bootable installer.

You will not be able to encrypt your hard disk without a recovery partition.

[Sumleilmus]

I thought I knew that about Windows having to boot from one of the first four partitions. I am learning from the thread that was cited that that's not necessarily true, but rather that that's the only solution that Apple offers. That thread is long, and there is a lot of interesting information in it.

I have both an SD card and a USB stick to accomplish those things, which is why I am annoyed with myself for not controlling my software better and for allowing CCC to insert that Recovery HD partition.

What I proposed in my original post was to absorb the Recovery HD partition into the partition that precedes it, changing the number of partitions. I hoped thereby to regain bootability of the Windows partition.

It would be enough work for me to rebuild this drive that I am proceeding cautiously at this point.

Thank you very much for all your thoughtful suggestions.

Oh yes, I do not want to use FileVault2 on the installation of Mountain Lion on this drive, so I will not miss having the Recovery HD partition in another location in the machine.

[agentx]

I was really talking about Windows aka Boot Camp but even on a mixed system we generally have always put Windows on 1-4 partitions just as good practice more than anything . It has to be on 1 of the first 4 partitions for Bootcamp to work.
Bootcamp assistent does lots of clever stuff shunting bits about but has limitations when you want triple boot etc.

To be honest i just run Virtual Machines now (Win XP/7/8, RHEL, Ubuntu, Debian, Mac OS X 10.6/10.7/10.8 server and client etc) now and BootCamp installs are rare but not gone from my deployments. My next project is to setup ESXi at home office ;-)

Of course there are reasons for native booting and have some users who use Mac Hardware with Windows 7 24/7.