Lost my Yosemite partition but still have windows one (MAC)

PetLamb101 · Apr 19, 2015

Hey everyone, today as I logged on to my computer to select which disk I would like to boot from, the Yosemite one was missing... All my important files are on there, so help would be appreciated. When I go to disk utility, it says that the Yosemite hard drive (disk0s2) isn't mounted, and when I try to repair it, it doesn't work. Any ideas? Thanks a bunch

Oh, by the way, when I go on Windows and go to file explorer, my Macintosh HD is still listed and contains all my Yosemite files.

Lifeisabeach · Apr 19, 2015

That's not sounding good. Your drive may be crashing. To get you to a point where you can at least get your files off (no backups, I take it? tsk tsk...), you can try a more advanced recovery tools. DiskWarrior and TechTool Pro are probably the best available. There's no guarantee that they will work though. You can also use TTP to do a surface scan to see if the drive is in fact failing.

EDIT: note that these are Mac tools, not Windows ones. You'll need to make a bootable volume on an external drive to run these.

PetLamb101 · Apr 19, 2015

Forgot to mention

Lifeisabeach said:
That's not sounding good. Your drive may be crashing. To get you to a point where you can at least get your files off (no backups, I take it? tsk tsk...), you can try a more advanced recovery tools. DiskWarrior and TechTool Pro are probably the best available. There's no guarantee that they will work though. You can also use TTP to do a surface scan to see if the drive is in fact failing.

EDIT: note that these are Mac tools, not Windows ones. You'll need to make a bootable volume on an external drive to run these.

Sorry I forgot to mention that when I go to Windows, and go on file explorer, Macintosh HD is still listed and all my files are in there, so now it's just a case of booting to Yosemite on it, however, I can't seem to do that :/ Any idea why I can't boot from it? Thanks

PetLamb101 · Apr 19, 2015

ferrarr said:
Can you go into Windows and in the Bootcamp Assistant, select your Macintosh HD as you Start up Disk.

Unfortunately, I cannot.
The following disks are available:
Customer Windows
Recovery HD OS X
BOOTCAMP Windows

Thanks

pm-r · Apr 19, 2015

PetLamb101 said:
Sorry I forgot to mention that when I go to Windows, and go on file explorer, Macintosh HD is still listed and all my files are in there, so now it's just a case of booting to Yosemite on it, however, I can't seem to do that :/ Any idea why I can't boot from it? Thanks

I'm not familiar with running Windows at all, but if you can see your files and data with it, are you not able to get them copied and saved to another storage volume? I'm assuming you have no current backup.

Lifeisabeach · Apr 19, 2015

PetLamb101 said:
Sorry I forgot to mention that when I go to Windows, and go on file explorer, Macintosh HD is still listed and all my files are in there, so now it's just a case of booting to Yosemite on it, however, I can't seem to do that :/ Any idea why I can't boot from it? Thanks

No idea why exactly. Clearly you have some corruption to the file system, perhaps even the system files themselves are damaged. That could have happened courtesy of a drive that is failing, or something going on when booted into Windows (rogue app or malware mucking up that partition?). Since you can see the files, back them up if don't have one and if you value them before you can't back them up. Then reinstall OS X from scratch IF you still trust that hard drive. Or SSD... whatever it is. In any event, you should have a long-term regular backup plan in place just in case that drive does go belly-up.

PetLamb101 · Apr 19, 2015

Lifeisabeach said:
No idea why exactly. Clearly you have some corruption to the file system, perhaps even the system files themselves are damaged. That could have happened courtesy of a drive that is failing, or something going on when booted into Windows (rogue app or malware mucking up that partition?). Since you can see the files, back them up if don't have one and if you value them before you can't back them up. Then reinstall OS X from scratch IF you still trust that hard drive. Or SSD... whatever it is. In any event, you should have a long-term regular backup plan in place just in case that drive does go belly-up.

I thought of that, but I thought just thought it would be a big pain. If that's what I have to do, I'll do that. Thanks alot