Changed Drive letters and killed my Hackintosh; Please Help!

[ibruno]

I am really hoping that someone here can help me with my problem.

Up until an hour ago, I had a perfectly good, no great system. In addition to the specs in my signature, I was running the following on my dual boot system:

Hard Drive 1 OSX: 500 GB HD, running OSX 10.6.2 and all of my programs
Hard Drive 2 Media: 1.5 TB HD, all of my media ( docs, images, music, video, etc)
Hard Drive 3 Backup OSX: 500 GB HD, SuperDuper clone of HD 1
Hard Drive 4 Backup Media: 1.5 TB HD, SuperDuper clone of HD 2
Hard Drive 5 Windows: 500 GB HD, running Windows 7 ultimate

I use SuperDuper to create nightly clones of HD 1 and HD 2, and the last backup was made last night.

I have a dual boot system; Chameleon lets me access either OSX or W7 at startup.

I have Bootcamp installed on the Windows HD (HD 5), so I can access the files that I have on the Mac formatted HD's 1 - 4 within Windows 7. Although I have read access to these drives, I do not have write access. So far so good.

Until I messed things up, Windows 7 read the Hard Drives as follows:

Windows (C)
Backup Media (D)
OSX (E)
Backup OSX (F)
Media (H)

My stupid OCD decided that this labeling was incorrect, so I changed the drive letter paths via Disk Management in Windows 7 to the following:

Windows (C)
OSX (D)
Media (E)
Backup OSX (F) I did not change this drive letter
Backup Media (G)

HERE IS MY PROBLEM:


Now I can no longer boot up the computer! If I boot from my iBoot disc, I am given the option of booting from iBoot, Apple HFS + (should be OSX), Backup OSX, and Windows.

Selecting Apple HFS + will not the boot the computer; however I can boot from the Backup OSX HD. But when I do boot into Backup OSX, it won't mount OSX (HD 1), Media (HD 2) or Backup Media (HD 4).

These HD's do show up in Disk Utility, but instead of having their proper names, it says disk0s2 for OSX (HD 1), disk2s2 for Media (HD 2) and disk5s2 for Backup Media (HD 4).

These HD's do show up in Windows 7, however, and all of the correct data is still there and able to be read via Bootcamp.

Since I can boot off of the Backup OSX HD, I am not concerned about recovering the OSX HD. What I am concerned about (actually freaking out over) is recovering my Media HD. It's currently unreadable in OSX but readable in Windows 7. Any ideas on how to get OSX to recognize the Media HD again?

I changed the drive letter paths back to the original paths, but that did not fix the problem. I'm sure the only reason that I can still boot into the Backup OSX HD is because I did not change that drive letter path in Windows 7; all of the other drive paths were changed.

Any ideas/insight into this problem would be greatly, greatly, appreciated.

Bruno

 

[humph]

This is a bit of a guess, so you might want to take offline (disconnect) BackupMedia, and poss OSX, totally... before doing anything much until a fix is verified for Media.

I figure that in the process of re-allocating drive letters in Win, that something in the HD boot sector/MBR got messed with, making OSX not recognize the drives correctly.
Since you can access the data via Win 7, it's not messed with the data, so that should be all OK.

Presume that all the drives except Win 7 were GUID partitioned.

1) What happens/can it fix the situation doing in OSX a verify/fix disk in DiskUtilities? Not sure that will help as applies to partitions usually, but might be low-risk experiment.

2) Other option may be to re-bless the drives when booted into OSX (this would wipe out Chameleon and Win 7 MBR stuff on the drives, but you dont care about that as Chameleon on Win 7 HD). Don't have my install DVD here, but I think there's some option on that in Utilities that may help to do this w/o needing terminal commands. Else try to select drive as "startup disk" in System Preferences - this might not work at all, or only for OSX drive.

Other ideas are more whacky, so I'll stop here for now!

 

[ibruno]

This is a bit of a guess, so you might want to take offline (disconnect) BackupMedia, and poss OSX, totally... before doing anything much until a fix is verified for Media.

Thanks for the reply! Taking the Backup Media HD offline was a great suggestion, thanks!

Presume that all the drives except Win 7 were GUID partitioned.

You are correct in your assumption; with the exception of the Windows HD, all of the other HD's were GUID partitioned.

1) What happens/can it fix the situation doing in OSX a verify/fix disk in DiskUtilities? Not sure that will help as applies to partitions usually, but might be low-risk experiment.

2) Other option may be to re-bless the drives when booted into OSX (this would wipe out Chameleon and Win 7 MBR stuff on the drives, but you dont care about that as Chameleon on Win 7 HD). Don't have my install DVD here, but I think there's some option on that in Utilities that may help to do this w/o needing terminal commands. Else try to select drive as "startup disk" in System Preferences - this might not work at all, or only for OSX drive.

The problem I am having is that OSX will not recognize the drives at all. Because of this, I am unable to run Disk Utilities on unless I re-initialize the hard drives first! I am attaching the error message that I get on boot up below.

I am currently running Windows because I can access my Media HD files from within the OS. For example, I can play everything in iTunes fine and although I can't write to the Media HD, read access works fine and I can open docs within the Media HD and do a "Save As" to the Windows HD (again, I can not write to the Media HD, only read).

I thought that because I did not have write access to the GUID partitioned drives that I could not cause any damage to them within Windows; I guess I was wrong! Changing the drive letter paths must have made some change somewhere on the HD that OSX does not like.

Although it appears that my data has been preserved (thank God!) I am desperate to get OSX to recognize the Media HD again.

If that fails, then the other question that I have is how I would get the data from the Media HD to a GUID partitioned HD if I only have read access and not write access to such HD's within Windows 7?

Bruno

 

[humph]

Well, I am guessing that one option would be:

1) Get hold of Transmac. AFAIK, the free trial supports writing HFS etc from Windows*.

2) Reinitialize the non-working system (OSX) drive in OSX, GUID HFS+ etc, which is going to effectively destroy access to the data on it, but that's OK as pretty useless right now, then:

3) In Windows, copy data from the media disk to this "new" disk using Transmac. Since it's media files, should make an OK rsult (no hidden or system files etc to worry about).

4) Boot backupOSX and check you now have this OK media/data disk readable in OSX.

5) If all OK, in OSX, reinitialize the other disks and make SuperDuper clones of the OSX and the media/data**.

6) Live with whatever DriveLetters are assigned in Win. (actually, I guess you can control that by booting Win with one GUID drive connected, then reboot with adding the next GUID etc to move up the drive letters E, F, G etc.

*If not, then it does write .dmg images, so you could create a HD image file instead and copy the contents of the media HD to that image. Then when in OSX "restore" or just copy the contents of the mounted .dmg to the appropriate HD drive

** The clone of the bootable OSX will not be bootable, w/o using iBooot, until you install Chameleon (vai Multibeast etc) on the HD.


This is safest approach I can think of, rather than messing with apps that can "rebuild" the GUID partition info from MBR info in an attempt to get OSX to be able to read the info. I've done that, but only once and on stuff that did not matter if lost forever. (Am still guessing that the partition info was damaged by Win7 such that OSX can't read it, hence the "needs initializing" error.)

 

[ibruno]

This is safest approach I can think of, rather than messing with apps that can "rebuild" the GUID partition info from MBR info in an attempt to get OSX to be able to read the info. I've done that, but only once and on stuff that did not matter if lost forever. (Am still guessing that the partition info was damaged by Win7 such that OSX can't read it, hence the "needs initializing" error.)

Once again thanks for the insight. Since Backup OSX was working just fine, I already went ahead and cloned Backup OSX to OSX and I now have both OS Hard Drives working properly. So that just leaves my Media Hard Drives broken.

I found that I can run a "Verify Disk"/"Repair Disk" on the Media HD within Disk Utility. This is the message that I get when I do so:

So it seems that changing the Drive Letter paths resulted in Windows 7 writing some data to the boot block of the HD, which renders it unreadable in OSX.

I do have Disk Warrior and I was gong to see if that would repair the Media HD. Since I essentially have two copies of my Media HD's (Media and Backup Media), I thought that it would be worth a try to see if I could recover the HD that way.

Or do you think that going the route you explained is a better option? I only have "media" files on the Media HD's, so there are no executables on those disks. Do you think it would be safer to copy these files over to a GUID partitioned disc within Windows as you explained rather than trying to get Disk Warrior to fix the HD?

The Media Hard Drives hold all of my photos, videos, music, .psd's, .pdf's, etc, and I really can't afford to loose/corrupt any of that data.

Bruno

 

[humph]

Or do you think that going the route you explained is a better option? I only have "media" files on the Media HD's, so there are no executables on those disks. Do you think it would be safer to copy these files over to a GUID partitioned disc within Windows as you explained rather than trying to get Disk Warrior to fix the HD?

I'd try the copy over in Windows using Transmac (free trial period, so no cost), to avoid the risk that using DiskWarrior etc made the media disk(s) unreadable in Windows as well as OSX!

Or, even easier (no need for Transmac, just rely on the bootcamp driver HFS+ read capability) and perhaps even safer...copy over the media files in windows to a spare NTFS disk (or one of your OSX disks temporarily reformatted to NTFS*....since worst case it's easy to reinstall OSX from the DVD if all goes wrong). Then in OSX, you should be able to read from this NTFS disk and recopy the files over to a Mac-formatted disk.

Only once you are safe, then might be interesting to try use diskwarior, or gptsync etc to see if it could recover...but not as the 1st thing to try, and only out of curiosity.

* Repartition/Format as Win/FAT in OSX, then boot into Windows and reformat again as NTFS.