I consider to upgrade from Mountain Lion to Mavericks. I have two Bootcamp Windows 7 partitions, one for boot & system, another for documents and data. Both Windows partitions are NTFS. OS X recovery partition was manually removed prior to installing Bootcamp/Windows.
Any risk that upgrade will break either of my Windows partitions? How to minimize the risk? It definitely happened last time I upgraded from Snow Leopard (or Lion?) to Mountain Lion.
One post suggests that it happens with any OS X upgrade, though I'm not sure it applies to my situation.
Update: Tried running upgrade, got this message: "Install Failed: OS X could not be installed on your computer. OS X can't be installed on the disk because a recovery system can't be created. Visit www.apple.com/support/no-recovery to learn more" which links to another support article (which is surprisingly for Lion) suggesting to manually shrink the OS X partition which will allow space for creating recovery partition. The question is still the same: will it hurt either of my Windows NTFS partitions?
This is how my partitions look on OS X side:
Best Answer
Usually OS X backups don't mess with the partitions, except for when they create a recovery partition. And since your recover partition has been (manually?) removed, OS X will probably try to add it again.
If you do the upgrade, definitively back up all your stuff (on the windows side as well!).
If you want to play it really safe: 1 - get an external (usb) drive 2 - copy your mac-partition to that drive (via disk utility or any other cloning software) 3 - boot from the external (usb) drive and run the update there 4 - clone the partition back form the external onto your internal drive