Mac partition slow and unrepairable

[Garetty]

I have an HP Probook 4430s with a Windows 7 / Mac OS X 10.9 dual boot with the Chameleon bootloader. My problems started when I booted into OS X and it was just running extremely slow and nothing would load quick. So I opened Disk Utility to check the disk, which told me it needed to be repaired but with my installation CD. So I plugged in my installation flash drive and tried repairing, and it said it needs to be formatted and reinstalled. Windows 7 runs just fine. I installed MacDrive (Trial) on Windows and tried to repair, but it failed also. It sometimes will mount, but when it does, it says: Disk is not accessible; The disk structure is corrupted and unreadable.

So I backed up all my stuff when I got it to mount, and booted into my installation flash drive to format and reinstall... And it can't be formatted. I can't remember what exactly it said, but I know I couldn't format it.

I posted here to see what you think I should do. I'm not sure if that partition or something is just shot and I need a new hard drive. Or I was going to try to download Ubuntu and see if that can format it. I just figured I'd ask here for other ideas or to know what could have possibly happened..

 

[npasch]

Are you using a SSD?

 

[rob1980]

use linux / gparted for any partition / format issues, can read / write and create hfs+ partitions unlike windows, and when osx has issues.

 

[Garetty]

npasch, it's an HDD.

rob1980, that's what I'm going to do. Just wasn't for sure on what caused the partition to screw up like it did, or if there were any better options to recovering it.

 

[rob1980]

I know from experience trying to do anything in windows partition "can" but doesn't always screw things up for OSX.

For example, I formatted a blank partition to fat32 in windows to us in OSX, forgetting about the 4gb file size limit I tried to delete the partition and create an HFS+ partition, only to fail over and over again.


So I created an NTFS partition in windows, used tuxera on OSX to be able to read / write to the partition, only to have copy issues when restoring files from my cloud storage.

I booted a linux USB install, formatted the partition to HFS+ on that (had to enable journaling in OSX) everything is perfect.

If you have your important data backed up, I would format the partition or drive in question, run a check on it to check its condition, make sure there are no errors, and continue form there.

As for knowing exactly what caused your problem, it would be hard to know. Drives can fail at any time, but when dual booting, and trying to use disk tools from different platforms, theres probably more risk to creating errors.

I think in this case, linux will help you out!

 

[Garetty]

So I did the same thing you did, booted from my Linux (Ubuntu) USB install and used GParted to format the disk. (After I installed hfsprogs). Then enabled journaling with OSX and installed. Now just restoring all my backed up programs and files!

 

[rob1980]

keep that ubuntu usb safe lol