Use GParted LiveCD to recover missing partition

Jan 13, '11 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: joelseph

My Macintosh HD startup disk disappeared today, but I was able to use GParted to delete a small partition from the drive and the missing disk reappeared.

Boot Camp Assistant got me into this hot water when I was preparing to reinstall XP. I had partitioned my harddrive into one 276 GB Mac partition and one 5 GB Windows partition, but decided to delete the Windows partition and start over. This time I used BCA and set the size of the new partition to 16 GB.

When running the XP installer, I noticed I was only shown a single 'C:' partition as an option for the install location. The first time I installed XP, I remember seeing two partitions listed with 'Unpartitioned space' between them in the list. Something didn't seem right, so I exited the installer and rebooted, holding the option key for the boot menu.

I was shocked to discover that my 'Macintosh HD' startup disk was gone... only a 'Windows' disk was available (not the install CD). I booted from the Snow Leopard install DVD and ran Disk Utility. It showed no partitions at all on the drive, and the verify and repair options were grayed out.

Yes, I had a Time Machine backup to restore from, but before doing that I decided to try booting from a GParted LiveCD.

Unlike in Disk Utility, the drive did appear to be partitioned, and I saw my large HFS+ partition (unlabeled, though) and another small partition. Although I was unable to 'check/repair' either of them with GParted, I was able to delete the 16 GB partition. After that, the 'Macintosh HD' label reappeared, the check command ran without a hitch, and I was able to boot back into Snow Leopard, without any data loss to speak of.

This Apple Support discussion describes a similar experience. I wonder if others have run into trouble using BCA?

[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one. Keep those backups up-to-date, folks.]

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