Parallels unmounted BOOTCAMP partition, I cant remount, cant use BC or Parallels

Hi all,

I hope someone here has some kind of idea what might be going on because I have some very valuable data on my boot camp partition and I did not expect a trial of Parallels to destroy it...

I tried installing the Parallels trial version of Desktop 6. For some reason it would not ID my boot camp partition and said that I had to mount it using the disk utility. I thought this was strange but didn't think much more of it. I continued to use my computer for other purposes for about an hour and decided I wanted to head back to my BOOTCAMP side, so I restarted into Windows and recieved "Disk read error, press ctrl +alt +del" from the DOS prompt. Restarted a few times and continued to get the same error.

I returned to OSX and discovered that my BOOTCAMP partition no longer appears on my desktop, or as an option for Startup Disk. If I start Disk Utility, I see my OSX partition, and then I see my BOOTCAMP partition, but now it is unmounted (greyed out) and reads "disk0s3". Attempts to mount it have been unsuccessful. If I try the same from the terminal I receive "Volume on disk0s3 failed to mount".

I attempted to use Parallels to read the drive to at least recover my important documents but when I pointed it to the (what used to be) boot camp partition, the virtual machine reported "no OS installed on this drive".

In some research in the issue, I read something about MacFUSE or NTFS-3G locking down the mount abilities of the drive. Someone is having a similar issue as me here, for example. Finder does see a folder with one file called "ntfs-3g" in /opt/local/var/ in a FUSE folder, but other than that I see no indication of ntfs-3g being installed. Not only that but I attempted both uninstalling and installing MacFUSE from System Preferences. In both cases I could still not mount the drive or boot to my boot camp partition.

Please help! I'm really at my wit's end here and I am horrified at the thought of losing all of my data.

 

No idea if this helps but here is diskutil info on the partition

Some further research indicates there may be an issue with MBR? This is getting far out of the realm of my expertise so I would have no idea where to start investigating.


Device Identifier: disk0s3
Device Node: /dev/disk0s3
Part Of Whole: disk0
Device / Media Name: BOOTCAMP

Volume Name:
Escaped with Unicode:

Mounted: No

File System: MS-DOS
Type: msdos
Name: MS-DOS (FAT)

Partition Type: Microsoft Basic Data
Bootable: Is bootable
Media Type: Generic
Protocol: SATA
SMART Status: Verified

Total Size: 125.3 GB (125294346240 Bytes) (exactly 244715520 512-Byte-Blocks)
Volume Free Space: 0 B (0 Bytes) (exactly 0 512-Byte-Blocks)

Read-Only Media: No
Read-Only Volume: Not applicable (not mounted)
Ejectable: No

Whole: No
Internal: Yes

 

More information, from rEFIt:


*** Report for internal hard disk ***

Current GPT partition table:
# Start LBA End LBA Type
1 40 409639 EFI System (FAT)
2 409640 243417127 Mac OS X HFS+
3 243681280 488396799 Basic Data

Current MBR partition table:
# A Start LBA End LBA Type
1 1 409639 ee EFI Protective
2 409640 243417127 af Mac OS X HFS+
3 * 243681280 488396799 07 NTFS/HPFS

MBR contents:
Boot Code: Unknown, but bootable

Partition at LBA 40:
Boot Code: None (Non-system disk message)
File System: FAT32
Listed in GPT as partition 1, type EFI System (FAT)

Partition at LBA 409640:
Boot Code: None
File System: HFS Extended (HFS+)
Listed in GPT as partition 2, type Mac OS X HFS+
Listed in MBR as partition 2, type af Mac OS X HFS+

Partition at LBA 243681280:
Boot Code: Windows BOOTMGR (Vista)
File System: NTFS
Listed in GPT as partition 3, type Basic Data
Listed in MBR as partition 3, type 07 NTFS/HPFS, active

Is this happening because the GPT start is 40 and the MBR start is 1?

 

Your MBR and GPT match ok. The MBR correctly has an EFI Protective partition that covers both the GPT (starts at block 1) and the EFI partition (starts at block 40). It's there in the MBR so that Windows doesn't clobber the GPT.

Use the diskutil, gpt, and fdisk commands mentioned at http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=88729
to get more info before trying anything else. Post the results here.

Try uninstalling or disabling MacFUSE. You can reinstall it afterward.

Try using Parallels to create a new virtual machine that uses a virtual hard disk as the boot disk and install windows to it. Then add your Boot Camp partition as the 2nd disk of the new virtual machine so that Windows can examine it.