11-16-2011, 08:49 AM

Hey there mac-forums, it was about time i registerd here i've gotten a load of advice from old topics throughout the years from this forum, but now i'm really stuck.

Anyway, my mac os drive won't show up anymore, i'm typing in bootcamp right now.
I don't know what happened i wasn't doing anything "special" with the drives, just switched from bootcamp to os a bunch of times in the last 2 days.
i tried everything that was adviced in this topic:

Boot Camp installed. My mac OS is gone? Only Windows shows??

But to no good, when i reset my mac's pram it still boots in windows, and i can't repair my harddisc with my install dvd..

but. i am able to acces my macintosh hd through bootcamp (so fortunately i have been able to backup some important files)
But now my question is first of all, is there anything else i can do to fix it?
then if not, i'm wondering if there is a way to make a time machine backup from my macintosh hd through the windows running on bootcamp

all advice is appreciated!

11-16-2011, 09:52 AM

One thing you can try is booting from the install disks so that you can use Disk Utility. That will show you what is going on with the partitions. It also should allow you to copy the entire Mac partition onto an external drive. Here's a link for what I'm talking about Backup Strategy for Mac OS X Using Disk Utility, Carbon Copy Cloner, etc. | Midwestern Mac, LLC (You can use a USB drive even though the article talks about a FireWire drive) At that point you can technically just do that in reverse to the internal drive. This will reformat the internal drive so you'll probably lose the Bootcamp partition but at least you would have the Mac HD back in working order. Again, this is just one option. Someone may have a better solution.

11-16-2011, 10:12 AM

Thanks! i didn't know you could copy an entire partition through disk utility, i'll give it a try right away hope it'll restore it to a working drive, still open for more solutions tho!

11-16-2011, 11:21 AM

so i tried, you have to set a source and destination.
i can set my macintosh hd as the source, but i can't set an external hdd as destination, and my bootcamp partition is only 20gigs so i don't think that would work either?

any ideas?

11-16-2011, 11:30 AM

Its not showing up more than likely b/c you probably need to format your external HD if it is not setup for Mac (Most externals are formatted in Fat32 but it needs to be Mac OS Extended Journaled) You can do that with the Disk Utility as well. Here's a link explaining how to do so. How to Format a Hard Drive in Mac OS X | eHow.com

11-17-2011, 08:03 AM

Good advice, tho it didn't work. i formatted it into os extented.
Left it on all night to back-up the hd into my external.
Now both are corrupted (and they show up in the side-bar in light grey)
So i tried verifying and repairing the external hdd, but the same thing happened:
"Disk utility stopped repairing macintosh HD, Disk utility can't repair the disk, back up as many files, reformat and restore your backed-up files"

The entire thing copied tho, i have my whole hard disk on my external now, I wonder what's so corrupted it can't repair or boot..
any other ideas? or is my only option just formatting, and then slowly pulling off useable old files from my external hdd?

Thanks for all the help so far!

11-17-2011, 11:22 AM

Can you mount the external and actually look through the files on it? If you can get all the files you would need off of it I would say the easiest thing would be to reinstall the OS on the Mac and like you were saying pull off any important files from the external back onto the Mac. If you're wanting to fix the file system issues, most people around the forums recommend using Disk Warrior. I've never personally used it and it's pricey, but it seems to have good results. EDIT: I searched a little bit and looks like they used to offer with older versions of Disk Warrior a trial before you buy but it seems since the 4.4 update that it is only for purchase, can't find a trial.