Mac OS X 10.7.5 boot volume in a strange state

[francism]

I have a very strange situation that I have spent hours trying to solve.

It began with me connecting an external hard drive to my Mac OS X 10.7.5 MacBook Pro. I got the error "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer". I get the same for any external hard drive (these mount without problems on another Mac). If I try to open a dmg file, I get "no mountable file systems". I booted via Lion Recovery and repaired disk permissions and repaired disk, then rebooted. This did not help.

When booted normally via the boot drive, Get Info shows that the format of the boot drive is "Unknown (hfs)".

The strange thing is that when I booted via Lion Recovery, the boot drive on the MacBookPro showed up as a normal Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format.

I can boot up in Mac OS X or to Windows 7 via Boot Camp, so the thing does work, but I cannot do a Time Machine Backup. I can enter Time Machine but I cannot view any backups (though they are listed on the right).

I would like to "check the filesystem" as this sounds helpful, but I'm not sure how to.

I have two Bootcamp Windows partitions so I am afraid to reinstall Lion or upgrade to Mountain Lion.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Francis.

[DeltaMac]

Do you have separate bootable Windows installs on those two other partitions?
Your Boot Camp Assistant does not provide a way to more than one partition.
What did you use to create the second Windows partition?

You are under 10% free space on your OS X partition.
That should give you cause for some concern.

I suggest that you boot to the Lion Recovery system partition, and choose to reinstall OS X.
That will not affect your two Windows partitions, but may get your device drivers reset on the OS X partition (which is at least part of your situation.) When that reinstall is complete, run your Software Update to assure that your system is back up-to-date.

[francism]

DeltaMac, thanks very much for your knowledgeable response.

I am currently scrambling to backup everything not backup by Time Machine.

"10% free space" - this is because of a huge Aperture library and because I foolishly thought I could have a work and a play computer in one - disk space divided into two OS's.

"the second Windows partition" - I'm pretty certain I used Boot Camp assistant - I don't recall installing a utility to do this.

If I reinstall OS X, will this wipe out only the Mac OS partition? Will I be able to restore from my Time Machine backup to get my applications and preferences back?

And, by the way, a folder called "lost+found" was created at some point...

Thanks,

Francis.

[DeltaMac]

You did say that you have _two_ Windows partitions, is that correct?
The Boot Camp Assistant creates one extra partition, to use for installing a bootable Windows system. Do you have then another partition, also with another bootable Windows system? As far as I know, if Boot Camp Assistant has already created a partition, it won't add to that number. Your only choice, if a boot camp partition already exists, is to remove that partition. If you add another Windows partition, you would need to use some other utility for that, such as rEFIt.
a "lost+found" folder will sometimes be created by Disk Utility, if a disk repair finds orphaned or damaged files that the repair function cannot account for in the directory.
It's also another indication that your hard drive continues to have some problems.
What do you see inside that "lost+found" folder? Is there a huge number of files? (huge for me would mean more than 40 or 50 files)

[francism]

I have one Boot Camp partition. The other one is a Windows NTFS partition, which I'm sure I used Disk Utility or Boot Camp Assistant to create. lost+found contains 26 folders with many files - not good!

No luck using Drive Genius or Disk Warrior to recover.

It appears I can use Lion Recovery to restore from a Time Machine Backup - please tell me that this will work and that the two other partitions will not be affected.

Thanks very much.

[DeltaMac]

Interesting!
Well, Disk Utility can't create an NTFS partition, and neither does the Boot Camp Assistant.
Unless you have one of the NTFS utilities installed, such as NTFS-3G.
Restoring from a Time Machine backup would not affect anything other than the OS X partition, as Time Machine doesn't do anything with your Windows files.
Show a few examples of the names of files in some of those folders. Often, there's no easy way to track down where those files might have come from, which in turn, makes it challenging to get those files from a Time Machine backup. I suggest that you boot to your Lion recovery partition, and run the OS X install. It can at least replace the system files that might be in your lost & found folder. That also won't affect the Windows partitions, unless you want to wipe those out...

[francism]

DeltaMac - Sorry! I now realize I most likely used Paragon NTFS for Mac to create the NTFS partition.

I will now try the OS X install from Lion Recovery, then restore from Time Machine.

[DeltaMac]

I suggest that you check that your system is working properly again after the OS X install, A restore from your Time Machine backup may not be needed, at least for now.

[francism]

Don't I have to restore from Time Machine to get all my applications (with their preferences) back? I really don't feel like reinstalling loads of programs one-by-one.

[DeltaMac]

A reinstall of OS X does not remove all your apps and settings, and likely won't affect them in any way (there may be some exceptions to that, for apps that install or modify system files, which most do not)
Unless, of course, you choose to erase the partition first. Even then, a simple erase of the OS X partition does not touch your Windows partitions in any way. (If you do choose to erase the partition first, then, yes, you will need the TM restore.)
Try what I suggested, just a reinstall - Be sure to run the Software Update to verify that your system is fully up-to-date - then try out a few of your usual apps. I think you will find that all remain as you left them.

[francism]

As the Lion Recovery OS Install warned me that the drive (partition) would be erased (with me losing all the applications), I decided to restore from a Time Machine Backup instead. This worked. I have what appears to be a stable environment and I no longer have the original problem I posted. Time Machine Backups are working and I have restored from manual backups all files that are not backed up by Time Machine.

lost+found is gone, but I do now have a folder called "private". I will investigate what this is and also verify/repair permissions.

Thanks very much for giving me the confidence to solve this issue.

[DeltaMac]

The "private" folder is one of the system folders that is normally not visible. There are at least 15 folders that are normally hidden on your hard drive, such as bin, network, sbin, cores, and a bunch of others. I suggest that you don't need to do anything with that "private" folder that you see. You may have only part of those visible.
It likely points to the fact that your hard drive is still not quite right.
The Lion restore partition, choosing Reinstall OS X, does not normally tell you that the partition will be erased. I suspect that means that the hard drive is still not quite.
Here's something that you should check.
Launch your Disk Utility, and select the hard drive (the line with the hard drive manufacturer's info), and you should see the info block at the bottom of the window should tell you that the Partition Map Scheme is "GUID Partition Table" and not Apple Partition Table, or something else. Don't misunderstand here - your Mac will boot OS X from an APT partition, but you can't run the Lion installer on your Mac to install on an APT formatted drive. It has to be the GUID format to allow the installer to run. It's very likely that it's not GUID, and could even be Master Boot Record, which also won't let the Lion installer run.
Even an incorrect partition setup can have a Time Machine restore, and you may be OK for now.
I suspect that won't hold for as long as you might hope. Your next time may not be so simple to get going again.
I think your next step should be a method to backup your Windows partitions. Winclone is a good choice for that, from what I hear. I think you believe that your Windows software and files are important to you, so you should be taking the same care with good backups for those, too...