A possible disk-format-related cause of general Mac issues

Aug 10, '09 07:30:03AM

Contributed by: frgough

As the informal Mac support guy at work (a role many of us Mac users are no doubt familiar with), I had a coworker come to me complaining of a bunch of odd little behaviors on his Mac. Email acted oddly, applications would behave strangely, and sometimes when he first started his Mac, it would display the Net Boot logo for a couple of minutes, time out, then boot normally. When we tried to set his startup disk, we found that it wasn't listed as a choice in the System Preferences panel. Disk First Aid showed no errors, and repairing permissions showed some permission errors, with OS X claiming to have corrected them, but the errors remained on subsequent checks.

After a bit of sleuthing about, I discovered that he had recently swapped out the hard drive, and used Carbon Copy Cloner to move to the new drive. The drive was formatted as HFS+ Journaled, but the partition was MBR (Master Boot Record) and not GUID. Once we re-partitioned the drive, and restored his data, all his problems went away.

The moral of the story: OS X can boot off an MBR volume, but suffers indigestion. Just a little FYI for folks to put into their troubleshooting toolkit.

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