04-02-2012, 05:59 PM

Greetings. Have a slightly complicated story to spin on using Bootcamp and getting issues with partitions becoming unmounted.

I am a switcher with a lot of Adobe software - I would otherwise completely dive into Mac OSX Lion and live happily ever after. I therefore immediately setup Bootcamp when I got my new iMac. (Running Windows 7 Professional).

I discovered that with giant suites of software like Adobe CS4 that my initial 30 GBs for Bootcamp would be insufficient. I bought CamptuneX and resized the Windows partition. I went for 100 GB.

On the other end of the 1TB drive I loaded a lot of video and media files. I bought both flavours of Paragon drive writing software for NTFS from Mac side and HFS+ from Windows side.

I thought everything was fine until a few days ago when on repeated boots I could not seem to get the Macinstosh HD as an option. Eventually under Disk Utility I discovered that it was unmounted. I tried the "mount" button, and the repair function and rebooted, but it remained greyed out and unmounted. I decided to reformat the partition and I reinstalled OS X without issues (via the recovery process download).

I thought this was a crazy experience, but I chalked it up to resizing the partitions using Camptune X and decided that the reinstall would rectify the issues. Meanwhile today the reverse happened - the Windows partition (aka "Bootcamp") disappeared and I discovered it was now unmounted. I tried repeated reboots and pushed the "remount" button and attempted repairs but to no avail.

Long story short I just booted into OS X and under disk startup I can see the Bootcamp partition again! What gives?

I sense there's some instability going on with my system but I have no idea if it has to do with Bootcamp, the subsequent resizing with Camptune X, or if it is perhaps a defect in my hard disk.

I am totally committed now to the next step which is getting my backup routines solid so I can theoretically recover either partition easily in the future, but this is causing me some grief.

Is Bootcamp rock solid or prone to glitches? I note a month ago, shortly after I got the computer, that one of the first Apple updates that came my way described a fix for Bootcamp that involved drives appearing to be missing under start up (an EFI glitch apparently).

Please advise. Your help is much appreciated.

04-02-2012, 07:58 PM

First, the Boot Camp Assistant utility is stable and has worked well with all versions of OS X since it was first introduced with Leopard (OS X 10.5). Keep in mind that BC "assists" in the installation of Windows by creating a partition for it and setting up a boot sector for Windows. (dual boot setup) That being necessary since Windows uses BIOS settings for boot info rather than EFI which OS X uses.

After the installation of Windows is completed and it's up and running, BC is out of the picture and has nothing to do with the mounting or dismounting of the partitions.

CampTune, however, has undergone some changes and upgrades. The latest being CampTune X which is what I'm assuming you used to increase the size of your initial BC partition.

What makes the use of CampTune somewhat complicated is that now there is another partition to contend with - the hidden Recovery partition which Lion uses. I don't know if that's the reason you're having difficulty with mounting and dismounting, as it could also be related to the hard drive itself.

If you continue to have problems here's what I suggest: Make a complete backup of OS X - use Time Machine and perhaps also Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. Backup the Windows partition with the new version of WinClone.

Reinstall Lion from the Recovery Partition, restore OS X from Time Machine. Next, use the BC Assistant to create a Windows partition of the correct size, and then restore Windows from WinClone.

04-02-2012, 09:23 PM

I appreciate the reply. I certainly want to establish some good backup routines for the future and I hope the unmounting issue will resolve itself. If not, I shall try the process you suggest which I suppose basically involves wiping out every partition and reinstalling each OS, which I am fine with.