Partition disappeared!!! Help!!!

Friends,
I am having a serious problem with an iBook G4 1Ghz, 512Mb, Mac OS X 10.4.
I was creating an 2.7 Gb disk imagem with "Disk Utility".
While the image was being created, I've pressed Fn-F12 key combination that opens "Dashboard" on iBook. I don't know if that was the cause, or just coincidence, but something happened.
The image creation stopped, dashboard didn't open, and I couldn't do any operation on the computer, besides mouse cursor keeps working fine.
I restarted the computer, but it doesn't open Mac OS X anymore.
The system begins to load, pass thru the screen with the "Mac OS X initializing..", but doesn't enter on Finder.
Instead of entering on Finder, the system opens a black screen with a command line, asking for login and password. Anyway, it doesn't seem to accept the right password (or am I too nervous?). The system says the password is invalid, then the screen becames blue, and after a while I am back again to the black login screen.
I've tried the command reset-nvram and reset-all on Open Firmware, but without result.
I've tried the Mac OS X install disk. But on the screen that asks you to choose the disk where the system will be installed doesn't appear any volume!
The Disk Utility, from Mac OS X install disk, shows the disk icon and the icon of the (only) partition. But the partition icon is grey. The program informs that it is not mounted. It's possible to click on it, but the "Mount" button doesn't mount the partition.
Finally, I've tried to reset the PRAM seven times (as I've read on a site). No result.
So I tried (again) safe-boot, (while I am writing this). Up to now, it tooks one hour on the gray startup screen with the spinnig gear. but no boot!
What to do?
Thank you,
Márcio Moreira

You say that you can start up from the system installer disk, and that Disk Utility on the system installer can see the problematic drive. So... Can it reformat that drive? (Not the partition: the whole drive.) If it can, you can install a fresh system and start all over. But you will lose your data, so it would be good if you have a backup.
Alternatively, again, since you can see the problematic drive, DiskWarrior might be able to help, in ways that Disk Utility can't.

Similar Messages

Windows 7 partition disappeared?

So as I was creating a partition for Windows 7 (500 GB, leaving the Mac partition with 100 GB to spare), it gave me some sort of error about files and what-not (I apologize for not remembering). I then proceeded to click okay, and I tried to create a new partition with the same GB space, but this time, as I was using safari, my iMac froze and I decided to turn off the computer and turn it back on again. After that I immediately went back to bootcamp, and tried to make another partition, but this time, I only had 77 GB to add to the already 20 GB Windows 7 partition. Meaning I only have 97 GB left on my iMac. Did my partition disappear with all that storage? Please help me.
iMac version 10.6.8

That program, NTFS 3G, has nothing to do with whether or not you have a Win 7 partition and whether or not it is still on your drive or has disappeared.
Open System Preferences and go to Startup Disk. Is the Win 7 partition listed as a startup drive? If it is then it hasn't disappeared, it still there. Another way to get to it is to hold down the Option/Alt key at startup. That brings up a BOOT Menu screen where you can select which partition to boot from. Is the Win 7 partition listed? If it is then it hasn't disappeared.
But that program you installed has been corrupted in some way and not loading. That program, NTFS 3G, is for Mac OS X to Write to NTFS formatted partitions which natively it Can't Do.

Windows partition disappearing - twice

Is this a common problem?
I installed a Bootcamp partition and put Windows XP on it. No problem installing and using Windows for many months. Then one day, it just disappeared - the Windows disk no longer appeared on the desktop and the option to boot from it disappeared from the startup disk in settings. The hard disk space occupied by Windows still seemed to be there i.e. it wasn't available in Finder. So, I used Bootcamp assistant to delete the Windows partition and started again, re-installed Windows XP and thought I'd sorted it until today when I tried to restart the Mac in Windows but the Mac didn't like it for some reason and hung. A quick switch off/on and the Mac restarted in Mac OS and again the Windows partition disappeared although the space it occupied is still there.
Does this make sense?
Is there anything else I can do before I go through the whole Bootcamp/Installation process again?
Should I give up on Bootcamp and use Parallels instead?
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Recovery partition disappeared

Hello everybody,
I'm using "HP G62x-400 CTO Notebook PC". Yesterday I installed "Powerquest Partition Magic 8.0". As it was incompatitable, uninstalled it. After that, I found my Recovery partition disappeared. I found the partition in Disk Management section of Win7 (My Computer[right click]> Manage> Disk Management) without any drive letter. I tried to set a drive letter it show following message:
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Any one please help, how to recover the partition and the data.
Thanks,
Siddique

In Windows 7
Start --> All Programs --> HP --> Recovery Manager
If this still exists in you Windows 7 desktop you should be able to perform a Factory Image recovery and return your notebook to its delivered condition. The recovery will recreate the partitions.
****Please click on Accept As Solution if a suggestion solves your problem. It helps others facing the same problem to find a solution easily****
2015 Microsoft MVP - Windows Experience Consumer

Strange Catalog Issue or bug. Help, photos disappeared help?

My images disappeared in the catalog. They are not missing, they are just not visable. I think there is a bug in the Fliter section.
Let me explain. I have one Main folder with 5 Sub folders. All those folders contain random amounts of images. (i.e. the path would be... Photo/2010/BeachShoot, or Photo/2008/PartyPics... etc).
I imported 5 years of images, hence 5 Sub Folders. I was randomly flagging images to be rejected with the 'x' key. Basically routine maintenance... flag so many, then call up only the rejected photos in the grid view, select all, then delete. Remove the Flag Filter... repeat process over and over... Basic, simple work...
Now... doing the exact some thing.. I removed all Flag filters and my images are no longer appearing in the catalog. I tested, by turning on flags, off flags.. etc. The images did not accidentally get deleted. I checked my hard drive location. Images are there. I rebooted the machine, I opened up another catalog, to trick it back... did not work. I tried to re-import the images.. but it says they are already in the catalog.
Strange part: On the Left Sidebar window, under Catalog "All Photographs" it shows the correct number of photos in the catalog. However... the strange part... Under "Folders" in the Left Sidebar beneath Catalogs my Main Folder shows "Zero" number of images. But, if I click on a sub root folder where the images reside, they number changes from Zero to the correct number of images and my images reappear on the screen as normal..
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The solution... Unsure? Help!
john
Strange Catalog Issue or bug. Help, photos disappeared help?
System: Mac OS X 10.7.2
Lightroom 3.6

We all get there sometimes Glad it was so easy!
Beat

Updated software on Macbook Air and bootcamp partition disappeared. Windows boot option no longer appears. Can I get it back and the data?

Updated software on Macbook Air and bootcamp partition disappeared. Windows boot option no longer appears. Can I get it back and the data?

Amy, is there a chance they could both be Syncing to another device that has the data erased?
What are the sizes & modification dates on the files you found?
Could be many things, we should start with this to be safe, though 2 different ones would seem unlikely to be this problem...
"Try Disk Utility
1. Insert the Mac OS X Install disc, then restart the computer while holding the C key.
2. When your computer finishes starting up from the disc, choose Disk Utility from the Installer menu at the top of the screen. (In Mac OS X 10.4 or later, you must select your language first.)
Important: Do not click Continue in the first screen of the Installer. If you do, you must restart from the disc again to access Disk Utility.
3. Click the First Aid tab.
4. Select your Mac OS X volume.
5. Click Repair. Disk Utility checks and repairs the disk."
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214
Then try a Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at bootup), run Disk Utility in Applications>Utilities, then highlight your drive, click on Repair Permissions, reboot when it completes.
(Safe boot may stay on the gray radian for a long time, let it go, it's trying to repair the Hard Drive.)
If perchance you can't find your install Disc, at least try it from the Safe Boot part onward.

Under SL, a 2nd disk partition disappears; re-appears if shutdown and start

Background: MacBook Pro, two+ years old. On day one I partitioned the 100GB drive into three sections for MAC OS, DATA and WINDOWS. Never installed Windows.
Just installed SL upgrade. Had some problems; MAC OS space was insufficient. It took SL a while to decide the WINDOWS partition was the wrong format. (I had forgotten the FAT formatting from two years ago.) SL install went into a loop more than once. Finally had to re-install the original MAC OS and then installed SL, which now seems to be working fine. (This is the short version of four+ hours to install SL.)
But now the DATA partition disappears at random times. It will be displayed on the desktop at startup and then, a while later, no longer be displayed. Disk Utility will show it as greyed out but Disk Utility Verify will report it's fine. If I shutdown and restart, it re-appears on the desktop.
I have used Time Machine since it came out. If the DATA partition is visible, Time Machine will include it in the next backup. If it is not visible, Time Machine will not include it.
My first goal is the get the DATA partition stable and permanently visible if there is something obvious that I can correct.
In studying this problem, I've learned that the MAC OS partition, 48.97 GB, is down to 137.3MB of free space. Is this a possible cause of the DATA partition problem? What other operating symptoms might I be seeing due to insufficient free space?
From reading other posts, it seems I have to re-format the entire disk drive to recover the WINDOWS partition, which is 12.75GB. Is that correct?
If I do a re-format and complete SL install, will Time Machine restore all of the working data?
thanks
Ray

Hi Ray;
Yes, running with only 137.3 MB in your system partition can cause all sorts of problems. I would suggest you get rid of enough of your files to get at least 10 GB free.
Since you are not using the Windows partition that might be a good place to move your photos and music to.
Allan

Bitlocker partitions disappear from laptop SSD

Hi,
I upgraded my laptop with a 512 GB Crucial MX100 SSD. The first SSD starting pausing for a minute or so every so often, then longer and longer. Finally
after a couple of days, the data partitions disappeared and were coded as RAW.
I replaced the SSD with the same model and restored the partitions leaving 100GB free space after the C Drive and left the last partition un-encrypted.
Today, the three bitlocker'd partitions are wiped again. Instead of saying RAW, they say nothing, just 0 for used and free space with File System
blank, but that might change if I reboot.
I left 100 GB unused for garbage collection (20%) and future emergency space, and other than doing "quick" formats, then bitlockering, then
loading data, there has not been much disk activity.
Partition
Drive
Space
Bitlocker
Primary
SR
350 MB
No
Primary
C:
Unallocated
220 GB
100 GB
P
Primary
T:
28 GB
P
Logical
H:
32 GB
P
Logical
M:
24 GB
P
Logical
U:
73 GB
No
The wiped drives were bitlockered, but C: didn't get wiped. T: and M: unlock automatically during the boot and H: unlocks manually.
There is no TPM in this machine so encryption is done at the OS level.
As far as I know, there hasn't been any power fail as the machine was left on last night and came out of hibernation OK this morning. I do not know when the drives messed up this time but they were OK yesterday. Windows Defender
says it is up to date.
Any suggestions as to which of Bitlocker, Win 8.1, the laptop (Aspire 3830TG-6415), or the SSD could be wiping the partitions?
I was wondering if it could be some mess up with TRIM between Windows 8.1 Disk Formatting, Bitlocker, and the SSD's automatic garbage collection?
Thanks, Bob.

Update:
It’s still too early for me to tell what is actually causing the problem. I found two great articles at Anandtech (X-25-M SSD and SSD Anthology) and decided to approach this differently. The problem may arise out of improperly formatting and then bitlockering
the partitions.
Before this, I really did not know much about the details of SSDs, particularly Garbage Collection and TRIM, or that the drives themselves needed unallocated space and idle time to unclog themselves. I now think there is a possibility that there may be a
firmware bug in the MX100 or a problem with respect to formatting Bitlocker volumes in Windows 8.1, which combined with a naïve user (me) can confuse the drive. Again, I am positing this as a possibility.
In the past, I have ALWAYS performed a full format on any HDD I ever used, in the machine that it is supposed to live in. Rather naively, I did that with the first SSD ten days ago. On top of that, I bitlocked the partitions after initialization and before
use. Except, once I might of reformatted and re-bitlocked a partition.
I now know that this would be a no-no in the SSD world, especially if TRIM was not working correctly for full formats, or time was not given for the SSD to perform a garbage collection, or Bitlocker did not pass TRIM commands correctly.
Since all the SSD sectors were used in the first drive, and all were written to possibly at least twice in a short while, the drive had a lot of page cleaning to do.
I suspect now, that somehow I might have managed to overload the MX100’s ability to garbage collect the bitlocker partitions and as a result, with something going haywire, the index to TRIMmed or garbage collected SSD pages got messed up. The drive, if this
is the problem, then managed somehow to clean its blocks AFTER I had restored data to them, thereby wiping data, resulting in completely NULL pages.
With this in mind, I reconfigured the partitions yesterday and left more unallocated space. I quick formatted the partitions, Bitlocked them, waited for a couple of hours, then restored data. There is now 108GB of unallocated drive space, plus another 54GB
of free space in the U drive (162GB) against 72GB of new, encrypted partitions. So far they have held up today. I do not know if this is really needed, overkill, or what.
Normally, with unencrypted volumes, there is enough unallocated file space that the SSD has lots of pages to work with. With fully encrypted volumes, they only have their own reserve to work with.
The current configuration is:
Partition
Drive
Space
Bitlocker
Primary
SR
350 MB
No
Primary
C:
Unallocated
220 GB
100 GB
P
Primary
M:
28 GB
P
Logical
H:
Unallocated
48 GB
8 GB
P
Logical
U:
73 GB
No
Bob.

Deleted dockmod and my dock has disappeared HELP PLEASE!!!!!!

Ive downloaded dockmod but I didnt like it so I deleted it and restarted my mac and my wallpaper and dock has disappeared HELP!!!!!

Might corrupted dock and desktop preferences ...
Open the Finder. From the Finder menu bar click Go > Go to Folder
Type or copy paste the following:
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist
Click Go then move the com.apple.dock.plist file to the Trash.
Do the same for: ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.desktop.plist
Then restart your Mac.
As you have discovered, third party dock and desktop customization apps can often cause problems.

IMac 27" (late 2011), Mountain Lion, Bootcamp, and OSX partition disappearing and refusing to mount

Hey all,
I'm putting this as a question in the discussion forms for bootcamp as I'm not sure where else to put it, but I resolved an issue I was having and having spent all of yesterday and the day before reading through this community and some others looking for answers and mostly seeing "hope you have backups, time to format!" (which to me is not always the best answer), I thought I would put it here for search purposes (with all the key words I had to use) in case anyone else has a similar issue.
My scenario was this:
2011 27" iMac with Mountain Lion installed and Windows 7 installed on a boot camp partition.
1) Haven't been in windows in a while, wanted to play some windows only steam games. Load windows 7. All is well. Have fun. Time to reboot into osx.
2) Reboot using bootcamp toolbar icon.
3) Wander away from computer. Come back to find windows 7 has loaded again. "That's weird", I think. Reboot again, this time hold down option key to select boot device.
4) Discover the only options are the Bootcamp partition and the Recovery partition. OSX "Macintosh HD" partition has disappeared. Huh.
5) Load recovery partition and load disk utility.
6) Review disk utility to discover the Macintosh HD partition shows up in the list, but won't mount. Run verify and repair tools. Errors are as follows: Invalid node structure, invalid key length, invalid record count, etc etc. Running a repair fails - disk utility advises me to back up and erase the drive and that the partition is unrepairable. No offense disk utility, but I think I'll try a few more options first.
7) Purchase DiskWarrior on advice of multiple posters in other threads and general online consensus of it being capable of fixing these sorts of errors. Go through process of loading bootable dvd.
8) Diskwarrior cannot see the Macintosh HD partition. This is bad. Review more threads. Advice is that if diskwarrior can't fix it, hope you have backups and wipe the drive. Likely to be hardware failure. I'm skeptical of hardware failure, because windows is chugging along running fine if I boot into it, and I ran a scan of the windows partition and it came back clean. SMART status is also showing the drive is ok. However, running out of options and starting to lose hope.
9) Follow advice in this support topic: http://support.apple.com/kb/ts1417?viewlocale=de_de Both safe mode and disk utility aren't options (safe mode won't work without it seeing the partition) so sounds like fsck is the final option.
10) Start up in Single User Mode (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1492). Run fsck per instructions. It reports back ok.
11) Realize fsck is checking the recovery partition, and not my damaged OSX partition. Realize I don't know anything about unix commands and have no idea how to tell fsck to check a different partition.
12) Learn that I need to find out what the drive id is for the damaged partition. Reboot, load up disk utility, select greyed out "macintosh HD" partition, click info. Write down the id: disk0s2 (likely to be the default for you as well if you have one drive in your imac and a default bootcamp install).
13) Go back into single user mode and type the following (without quotes): "fsck_hfs -fy /dev/disk0s2"
14) (Forgot to copy down exactly what it said at this point, but gist of it was that the drive had errors and isnt repairable). Feel like ****, thinking this is unlikely to resolve itself nicely.
15) With nothing to lose, try to force fsck to rebuild the catalog - "fsck_hfs -rc -d /dev/disk0s2" I found this syntax on some forums and can't find the thread again. I have no idea what the -rc and -d do that -fy don't, but if someone can let me know, that'd be cool. Either way, this resulted in something actually happening. Tells me it is "rebuilding catalogue b-tree". Still, finishes with a bunch of errors about improperly linked files, more node errors, etc etc.
16) Retry "fsck_hfs -fy /dev/disk0s2". It seems to be doing stuff now, even though there are lots of errors. Continue to re-run fsck using this syntax. Probably ran it 10-15 times. Takes over an hour. Finally, minimal errors being reported.
17) Realize that perhaps I should try Diskwarrior again now, since I've managed to do soemthing to the partition with fsck.
18) Run Diskwarrior from bootable DVD. Success! It now sees the damaged partition. Reports that it has a bunch of damaged crtitical files, and needs to be repaired, but hey, at least it can see it.
19) Let Diskwarrior do its thing, and reboot.
20) Boot from repaired OSX partition. Rejoice. Immediately plug back in the timemachine drive you foolishly unplugged to take away over the holidays and neglected to plug back in before you had commenced work on stuff you didnt want to lose through formatting, which is why you are so desperate to recover files rather than wiping and restoring from time machine backups and avoiding this whole mess.
TL;DR - If Disk Utility and DriveWarrior fail you, try running fsck (using different syntax that apple recommends) as many times as it takes to get the partition to a stage where diskwarrior can see it. All advice I saw for similar questions was to erase, reinstall OSX, and restore from time machine backup. For those of you who are foolish like me and had files that werent time machine'd, or those who operate without, maybe try this.
Hope this helps!

What -rc & -d do.
From: The fsck_hfs manual page.
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages /man8/fsck_hfs.8.html
-d      Display debugging information. This option may provide useful information when fsck_hfs cannot repair a damaged file system.
-r      Rebuild the catalog btree. This is synonymous with -Rc.
-R flags Rebuilds the requested btree. The following flags are supported:
                         a       Attribute btree
                         c       Catalog btree
                         e       Extents overflow btree
I had the same problem as you but unfortunately "fsck_hfs -rc -d /dev/disk0s2" is failing saying: "The volume   could not be verified completely." I believe it's supposed to be telling me the partition's name (normally "Macintosh HD") between 'volume' and 'could' because there's 3 spaces in between the words.
"fsck_hfs -fy /dev/disk0s2" is failing with the same error.
I tried "fsck_hfs -r -d /dev/disk0s2" since the c appears redundant with a lowercase R. and it again says it cannot be verified completely and adds "volume check failed with error 7". Which unfortunately is not documented on the fsck_hfs man page!
Unfortunately for me, Diskwarrior still can't see my busted Mac OS partition.

Duplicate partitions, need help to understand and fix.

So I was looking for a USB that I plugged in and went into /media/usbhd-sdb4/miles and realized all its contents was from my home directory.
So I created a random file in my home directory to see if it would also update /media/usbhd-sdb4/miles , and it did.
Can someone help me understand what is happening?
Also if I can fuse sdb4 and sdb2 as one, and partition it as my home directory without losing its contents?
Below is some information that I think would be helpful.
Thank you.
[miles]> cd /media/usbhd-sdb4/
[usbhd-sdb4]> ls -l
total 20
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 May 28 14:16 lost+found
drwx------ 76 miles users 4096 Oct 15 00:42 miles
[usbhd-sdb4]> cd miles
[miles]> pwd
/media/usbhd-sdb4/miles
[miles]>
lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 465.8G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 19.5G 0 part
└─sda2 8:2 0 446.2G 0 part
sdb 8:16 0 465.8G 0 disk
├─sdb1 8:17 0 102M 0 part /media/usbhd-sdb1
├─sdb2 8:18 0 258.9M 0 part [SWAP]
├─sdb3 8:19 0 14.7G 0 part /
└─sdb4 8:20 0 450.8G 0 part /media/usbhd-sdb4
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom

Check your udev rules...

Internal Drives Disappeared- Help

G4/1.0 DP MDD with four drives filling the internal bays. The two in the upper bay, one with the OS, show up fine. The two in the lower bay, under the DVD drive, which were showing up fine after installing 10.4.7 about ten days ago have suddenly disappeared. They don't show up under disk utility or System Profiler either. Booting with Disk Warrior, one of the drives appears on the list and DW says it is shown on the desktop, but it's not. Repaired the directory, but still nothing. Finder prefs are to show all drives.
I repaired permissions many times, zapped Pram, replaced battery, disconected the drives, checked the jumpers and reseated the connections and all seems fine. About three times over the last year, using 10.3.8 - 10.4.4 - 10.4.7, these drives disappeared temporarily, but returned upon a restart. Now they seem to be gone for good, but there must be something else I can do to try and get these drives to show up/mount on the desktop. Any ideas?? My next step is to remove the drives and put them in cases to check them, but I have a feeling that the drives are OK and there's something else going on here. I think the bus that these drives are attached to are slower than the main bus, but I only use these drives for backup and fortunately most of the info is old and not important. Still, I'd like to solve this puzzle. BTW all other types of external drives, Firewire, SCSI, USB are all working fine and I disconnected everything peripheral from the CPU to troubleshoot.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
MacScott
G4/1.0 DP MDD Mac OS X (10.4.7)

I had the exact same issue and did nearly all of what
you did, which are the typical troubleshooting
procedures.
This worked for me: replace the PATA cable with a
fresh one that is NOT a cable select IDE cable. The
cable select IDE has a little sliver cut from a
segment of the ribbon that makes the driver CS no
matter what the jumper setting.
I have no idea why this worked but it did. I have
not had a problem since.
Thanks, but I'm a little confused. So a new cable for each drive or are there doubles? Is this a universal cable Mac/pc? Maybe the cable that came with the drive (that I probably threw away)? Do you know the link of a supplier? Would any Apple store have these??
Knowing why this worked would relieve a little anxiety. Do these cables go bad just sitting in the cpu?
Anyway I googled PATA and I'm still not sure if I'd know the difference between a cable select and a non CS. I'll continue my research.
Thanks again!
Hmmm, swapping the drives. Maybe I'll try this before I swap the cables.
Thanks,
G4/1.0 DP MDD Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Recovery HD partition disappears when I install Mavericks. File Vault 2 can't be turned on.

Hi folks,
I've run into this issue and repeated internet searches don't turn up anyone else having the same problem.
Until a couple of days ago, I've had the most recent version of Mountain Lion installed with File Vault 2 turned on. Everything has been fine.
I did a clean install of Mavericks, and everything went fine with the install. During the post-install set up, I get a window saying that I used to have FV2 turned on, and that to do so again requires me turning it on in System Preferences. So I try to do that, but then I get a message saying that "some disk formats do not support the recovery partion that needs to be created...".
So I look (using both diskutil list and enabling the debug menu in Disk Utility) and see that the Recovery HD is gone. I don't know how to recreate it and don't understand the command line partitioning well enough to try it, so I try again with Mavericks, doing it the long way:
I do a clean install of Lion.
Boot up into Lion, and verify that the Recovery HD partition was created. It was.
Boot up from the Mavericks bootable USB I made, erase just the main partition I intend to install Mavericks on (again, I see Recovery HD exists).
Install Mavericks.
Boot up from the internal HD Mavericks, get the same note about turning on FV2 manually, and try to do so.
It fails again. I use diskutil and Disk Utility with the debug menu, and sure enough Recovery HD is gone and I cannot turn on FV2.
Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong? I feel like this would be a more widely discussed issue if this were a pure Mavericks issue. But Apple is not giving us a lot of support for doing clean installs (all instructions I find are on tech nerd blogs), so I'm lost about where to begin.
Thanks for your help.
It is Thu Oct 24 08:32:28 MDT 2013.
< Thu 8:32am ~ > diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Tesla                   499.2 GB   disk0s2

FWIW, I did a clean install of Mavericks with a bootable USB drive, which I created following the instructions in this link:
http://www.gottabemobile.com/2013/10/22/perform-clean-install-os-x-mavericks/
The short method did not work. I succeeded with the longer method.
Mavericks installed without a hitch, after which I spent hours customizing settings, clean installing applications and restoring data from my prior Mountain Lion backup. No problems at all, just very time consuming.
However, I could not activate "Find my Mac" because the installer had not created a a Recovery HD. I trawled the forums and was discouraged by the apparent complexity of creating one.
This is what I did, which worked perfectly and required very little attention. It is almost automatic, fail proof and done in under an hour (with a fast internet connection to download Mavericks at just over 5GB).
1.- Back up the system. Better still, clone your system to an external HD using Carbon Copy Cloner.
2.- Download Mavericks from the App Store.
3.- It will warn you that you already have 10.9 installed. Download anyway.
4.- When it finishes downloading you'll get a window prompting you to install. Confirm.
5.- Enter your user password when prompted.
6.- Go for a walk. In about 45 min your system will have restarted Mavericks and all your settings, applications and data will be there.
7.- Check that you now have a Recovery HD by restarting the system, holding the Option key down when you hear the startup gong. You'll (hopefully) see the system HD and the Recovery HD (10.9).
Hope this will help someone.

Cannot delete Mac OSX partition, need help

Hi,
I recently checked my storage space on my 256 GB Macbook Pro and realized that I only have 199 GB of total available space. Checking the Disk Utility, it appears that somehow I ended up with an "Untitled 2" partition that is taking up about 20 GB. This partition is listed as being "free space", but I cannot delete it or otherwise adjust how much space it is taking up. I think the partition might have been created when I installed the public Yosemite beta on a separate partition, however, it seems that I did not delete it correctly or something. How can I restore my hard drive to only having the default "Macintosh HD" and delete the partition to free up space? Thanks so much for any help.

Hi,
I recently checked my storage space on my 256 GB Macbook Pro and realized that I only have 199 GB of total available space. Checking the Disk Utility, it appears that somehow I ended up with an "Untitled 2" partition that is taking up about 20 GB. This partition is listed as being "free space", but I cannot delete it or otherwise adjust how much space it is taking up. I think the partition might have been created when I installed the public Yosemite beta on a separate partition, however, it seems that I did not delete it correctly or something. How can I restore my hard drive to only having the default "Macintosh HD" and delete the partition to free up space? Thanks so much for any help.

Windows XP Setup doesn't recognize my Boot Camp partition! HELP!!!

I just got my MacBook two days ago, and as soon as I got it, the first thing I did was partition the hard drive using Boot Camp Assistant, but didn't have an XP installation disk, so just left the partitions until I got the disk. But then today I got a Windows XP Home Edition SP2 Install Disk. I followed all of the instructions in Boot Camp, and I started the setup. When I got to the menu that said to choose a partition, it only showed my Mac OS X partition and not the Boot Camp partition. The only partition there was Partition 1, file system unknown, and so I quit the setup and booted up into Mac, and deleted the partition, then made another one in Boot Camp Assistant. I then tried the setup again, and got the same exact thing. Has anybody else had this problem, and if you have, how did you resolve it? This is very annoying, and any help would be appreciated.

dcarmody wrote:
I called AppleCare and they told me that it is doing this because it is an OEM version that came with my sister's Dell. You need either a retail copy or the other type of OEM OS disk.
This is nonsense. I installed from an OEM disk yesterday. The Windows OEM & retail installation disks are barely any different.
Note that Microsoft maintain that legally, as per the EULA, you can't buy an OEM version yourself & install it, and also that the license sticker's key may only ever be used on the PC it was originally stuck to. Here in Europe they suffered a court defeat on that latter point - you certainly need a separate license key for each computer but it maybe transferrable if you uninstall from the original PC. Nevertheless, Microsoft still insist to anyone who pays them attention that this condition holds, and indeed your jurisdiction may vary.
Unfortunately, this makes it frustrating to argue with anyone who maintains that you can't use an OEM disk (but nevertheless OEM disks DO work - I have used them on multiple occasions).
Stroller

Partition disappeared!!! Help!!!

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