Mac help

[SkyHog]

I'm stumped.

Had dual boot going on my Mac using Boot Camp (Snow Leopard), running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and OSX.

Decided to resize a partition using gParted, and now, Disk Utility in OSX is showing the wrong sizes....in a way that doesn't even make sense:

320.07 GB Drive
disk0s1 - 209.7 MB
disk0s2 - 307.6 GB
Freddy Mac - 255.62 GB

All on one drive. Add those up, and you'll find that is much, much more than 320.07 GB. Worse, now I can't boot into my Ubuntu install. Not a huge deal, but seriously, how do I fix this?

 

[denverpilot]

There's a reason gParted is free. Google a bit and see how much you really trust it with your data.

First things first... You Have. A. Backup. Before you started this adventure, right? I hope so... One you know will completely restore the machine from bare metal, and you've tested it, right?

Personally I feel the safest way to repartition Macs is simply to boot from the OS DVD and get the data off the Mac altogether, repartition with Disk Utility and restore the data and OSs to their new homes.

So I don't mess with gParted unless I want to try it as a "maybe it'll work, maybe it won't" shortcut.

In researching your problem to try to assist, I stumbled across a number of "how-to" sites that recommend turning off Journaling on HFS+ filesystems before resizing them. Did you resize your HFS+ (Mac) filesystem?

If I had to pick the more reliable application, I'd trust Disk Utility over gParted. But if you launch gParted from a live CD (you didn't run gParted from the Ubuntu partition while you were actively using part of the drive, did you?) what does it show now? The same thing as Disk Utility or something different?

Just thoughts. I think you went about it the "scary, no back-out plan" way... I hope we can get the two to agree on what your disk looks like now.

And if you don't have backups of that data... Make some. Like, yesterday.

 

[ScottM]

how do I fix this?

Buy another Mac?

 

[SkyHog]

There's a reason gParted is free. Google a bit and see how much you really trust it with your data.

First things first... You Have. A. Backup. Before you started this adventure, right? I hope so... One you know will completely restore the machine from bare metal, and you've tested it, right?

Personally I feel the safest way to repartition Macs is simply to boot from the OS DVD and get the data off the Mac altogether, repartition with Disk Utility and restore the data and OSs to their new homes.

So I don't mess with gParted unless I want to try it as a "maybe it'll work, maybe it won't" shortcut.

In researching your problem to try to assist, I stumbled across a number of "how-to" sites that recommend turning off Journaling on HFS+ filesystems before resizing them. Did you resize your HFS+ (Mac) filesystem?

If I had to pick the more reliable application, I'd trust Disk Utility over gParted. But if you launch gParted from a live CD (you didn't run gParted from the Ubuntu partition while you were actively using part of the drive, did you?) what does it show now? The same thing as Disk Utility or something different?

Just thoughts. I think you went about it the "scary, no back-out plan" way... I hope we can get the two to agree on what your disk looks like now.

And if you don't have backups of that data... Make some. Like, yesterday.

I don't know if I can blame gParted. Everything looked good until I tried to install Windows (big ol' mistake). When I tried to install it on the "unallocated space" I was presented with an error that said that it had reached the maximum number of partitions. Then I was stuck in the water, rebooted into OSX, and all of the partitions reported incorrectly.

gParted shows the correct partitions, as does Windows. OSX is the only one that is wrong. (More accurately, the abomination that is Disk Utility is wrong).

 

[murphey]

Have you had problems with BootCamp before or is this the first time? Just curious - why BootCamp instead of Parallels or VMWare?

 

[mikea]

It is gParted. I had it thoroughly screw up a Windows PC years ago to the point I may have lost pictures.

Having just made several attempts as I installed Windows 7 and Ubuntu on a laptop - go in this order: Install Windows. Run Windows Disk Manager to shrink the partition to suit. Then install OS X and let it install the (GRUB?) boot loader.

You can also resize the OS X partition with Disk Utility. Partition-New - Just drag the line between on the diagram or type in the desired sizes.

 

[flyingcheesehead]

I don't know if I can blame gParted. Everything looked good until I tried to install Windows (big ol' mistake).

Well, I'd say that it's pretty safe to blame Windows then.

Sorry I'm not of much help - Been a long time since I ran multiple hard partitions. Right now I'm just using one big partition on the drive and running VirtualBox with one of its "resizable" ones (which I think is just a file on the main partition.) Works great so far, even with Windows.

 

[Bob Noel]

No help here... just a comment that many years ago I got the bloody t-shirt so that I never ever will again try to resize a partition without assuming that all partitions on the drive will have to be reloaded.