Boot Camp doesn't see my windows partition after osx reinstall

E

exoendo

Registered
Hello,

I have a very interesting/annoying situation.

OSX crashed on me a while back. Before this happened I had a small windows partition and would run it via vmware fusion.

I had to reinstall my osx operating system, but the windows partition was left untouched.

I can still boot into windows just fine doing a system restart and holding down the option key. The windows harddrive even shows up on my osx desktop.

However, neither bootcamp or vmware fusion sees my windows partition.

What steps do I have to do to correct this, and why do you think this problem has occurred? It seems to unneccesary to reinstall windows/reformat when everything is technically "all there."

Please advise, all advice is appreciated, thank you.

-exoendo
 
How does Boot Camp see your system? Does it see only the Mac partition now?

If neither can detect it... you could save that Windows system first for Fusion, and then get rid of the partition, and if you need again Boot Camp, install that again.

So,

1. Download and install Converter http://www.vmware.com/download/converter and install this on your Windows side. Starter edition works fine. Install it, then select "import physical machine", "this machine", and select as format "standalone vm".
Connect an external hard drive that has enough space for this volume, and select that as destination. Depending on the speed and network speed etc, it may take anything between 10 minutes to a few hours (shouldn't take hours in this case though).
2. When this VM is ready on your external drive, rename the folder containing it from Somename to Somename.vmwarevm. The extension .vmwarevm will make Fusion see it correctly as a Fusion machine.
3. Launch Boot Camp assistant. There should be a way to join this partition to main. [I can have a look later at work to see how the Boot Camp options show again, since I don't have BC in use for my own system..)
4. Ideally, after getting rid of that unseen BC partition, you would use BC again to partition it, and install Windows again on that partition.

Or use some disk cloning software (something like Carbon Copy Cloner, but for Windows... Norton? Site Recovery is what comes to mind but that is usually only for business pricing) and clone the disk back -- for this option, it would be best to clone this source, Windows partition, first to the external disk, and then go to step 3.

5. If going with the Converter + Fusion option above, now your Boot Camp partition is contained in a Fusion VM. You could run it as itself, from your hard drive, or if you need Boot Camp functionality for something like gaming, install the Windows on that partition, and then clone the software to it. Or if it's a simple install with few software, probably keeping it clean can do as well.
Depending on your use of that Windows system, running it entirely inside Fusion may be enough. Make sure you have Fusion 2 installed (with Fusion 1 license you can install Fusion 2).
 
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