I have a big deal here. I have a MacBook with three partitions:
- HFS partition for Mac OS X 10.6
- NTFS partition for Windows 7 64-Bit
- NTFS partition for my documents
It thus works with both GPT and MBR. I use rEFIt to switch the system at boot.
Having had troubles with my Windows roaming increasing dramatically (what a pain), I had to increase the size of my second partition after reducing my third partition…
My problem is that my partitioning tool did a mess with the GPT and the MBR (I am a beginner to these systems and I used EaseUS's tool to work on the partitions. It was a big mistake.)
Now I have the following.
In the GPT
Partition Start LBA End LBA Type
1 40 409639 EFI System (FAT) ⇐ The boot sector, I guess
⇐ I miss my Mac OS partition (the entry was suppressed by Easeus)
2 126240768 252067839 Basic Data ⇐ My Windows partition
3 278693928 976773165 Basic Data ⇐ My Documents partition at the right place
In the MBR
Partition Start LBA End LBA Type
1 1 409639 EE ⇐ The boot sector I guess
2 409640 125976615 AF Mac OS X HFS+ ⇐ My Mac OS partition at the right place etc
2 126240768 252067839 07 NTFS/HPFS ⇐ my Windows partition
3 252069888 976773165 07 NTFS/HPFS ⇐ my Documents partition at the WRONG old place
rEFIt offers me to automatically copy the content of my GPT to my MBR: It would give me back access to my "documents" partition, but I would lose my OS X partition.
How do I manually write in those GPT and MBR to setup both sides? I heard it would be possible with UBCD …
Best Answer
Thank you for your advices.
I followed them and got help from Rod Smith (creater of gdisk).
The problem came from the fact that Easeus (the partition tool I used) was not aware of "hybrid MBR/GPT" systems. It did a mess thus.
Here were the steps to be taken : 1) using gdisk I repaired the GPT : - added the missing Mac partition (command 'n' in gdisk stating the type AF and the begin and end position) - sorted the partitions for it to become the second one as expected (command 's' in gdisk) 2) I have recreated the hybrid MBR based on these data ('x' command and then 'h' command in gdisk).
Of course, Gdisk allows also to create a backup of both partitions tables. That is a great tool and Rod's documentation on his website rodsbooks.com is great too (with examples and so on).
If you have a dual boot Mac with Windows that is great to correct your messed up partitions.