Macos – Unable to boot into OSX after installing Windows with Bootcamp

boot-campmacospartitioning

I installed Windows 8.1 Enterprise via Bootcamp on my MBP (Nov 2013 model), now I can only boot into Windows, no way to boot into OSX.

When I hold the ALT button at boot, the menu shows only Windows and there is no option to boot OSX.

When I select "OSX" from the control panel Bootcamp utility, and reboot, the system goes into Windows regardless. Windows works just fine (I'm using it now) but my main setup and a lot of work in progress is on OSX so I really need to recover it. Anyone knows how to recover the OSX partition, so that I can boot into OSX ? I'm happy to drop Windows if that's the case, but I cannot proceed with a fresh install wiping OSX.

The laptop is a MacBook Pro November 2013 model, with one original SSD drive (without DVD drive, however I have an external one) and I don't have a OSX installation disk, so I could not try recovery utilities etc.

I have tried a couple of Windows utilities, trying to change the Active partition, but for some reason that option is always grayed out, even DiskPart doesn't allow to set it.

I checked Disk Management and the OSX partition is still present (partition 1):

Disk 0:
Partition 0: 200 MB    - EFI System Partition
Partition 1: 837.57 GB - Primary Partition
Partition 2: 620 MB    - Primary Partition (no idea what this is for)
Partition 3: 93.47 GB  - Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition

and this is the output of MS DiskPart utility:

DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
  --------  -------------  -------  -------  ---  ---
  Disk 0    Online          931 GB      0 B        *

DISKPART> select disk 0

Disk 0 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> list partition

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1    System             200 MB    20 KB
  Partition 2    Unknown            837 GB   200 MB
  Partition 3    Unknown            619 MB   837 GB
  Partition 4    Primary             93 GB   838 GB

DISKPART> select partition 1

Partition 1 is now the selected partition.

DISKPART> active

The selected disk is not a fixed MBR disk.
The ACTIVE command can only be used on fixed MBR disks.

This How do I make my Boot Camp partition bootable again? seems to be very close to my problem, but rEFIt is distributed in CDR format, I tried to convert that to ISO and burn to a USB with no luck, the system won't see the USB.

Anyone knows of other ways to fix Bootcamp loader to show OSX partition ?

Best Answer

I had the same error after installing windows in bootcamp. I rebooted and the OS X partition was not an option, only windows. I checked in disk management in Windows and the partition still existed. I tried booting in recovery mode (command+r), but received an error message. -4403F

Apple support had me boot in internet recovery mode (command+option+r), which did successfully load.
I then went to disk utility, and the Macintosh HD disk was grayed out. I clicked on the mount/unmount button and had to unlock my computer. It turns out I had used file vault, which encrypted my hard drive.

Somehow that kept OS X from appearing after I used bootcamp. After unlocking it, I was able to verify and repair the disk.
I booted to windows and the bootcamp utility appeared. I clicked "Restart in OS X." OS X booted without a problem after that.

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