can I get my Apple_partition_map partition back?

[Christopher Murtagh]

On Tue, 29 Apr 2003, bruce wrote:
>Time to re-boot.  OOPS!  MacOSX now gives me the big circlewithaslash.
>Booted into my backup YDL 2.3 (on external SCSI) and used pdisk to look
>at partitions.  Ohmygod both my primary and backup OSX disks now have
>partition 1 as Apple_Bootstrap.  MacOSX doesn't allow me to mount either
>one so I can't restore.  Booting into OS9 I can still mount the disks and
>see all the data (at least the OS9 drivers are still there).  I tried
>pdisk, mac-pdisk, fdisk, drive setup, Norton Utilities, OSX Disk Utility
>and FWB HD Toolkit to see if there was some way to restore the partition
>map so OSX could recognize it.  I couldn't get any of those guys to help
>me (pdisk at least said he was unable to create partitions of type Map).  
>They all allow me to initialize though!
>
>Anyone have any ideas on how to get OSX to mount at least one of these
>disks?

 I had a very similar problem to this recently. I went to boot into MacOS
X (which I hadn't done in quite a while) and got the same
'circlewithaslash' that you mentioned. However, I couldn't mount the drive
with *anything* after that. The only thing I could do at that point is use
Data Rescue X (which I found on the web) to recover the data on the drive.
*Major* pain, and Data Rescue X is sorta brain dead - but at least it
worked.

 I had assumed that it was a problem with the FWB drivers on that drive, 
but I'm not sure now. Other info of possible interest is that this machine 
has two SCSI drives and an IDE drive in it. The installer crashed every 
time at the disk partitioning part when I had the IDE drive connected. I 
had to disconnect it to install YDL3.0. After that, I hadn't gone back to 
MacOS X until this problem came up. Looks like the installer might have 
hosed my partition map as well.

 Just out of curiosity, does your drive have FWB drivers on it as well? 
Maybe this is part of the problem? Or maybe the YDL3.0 bootstrap installer 
is wonky?

Cheers,

Chris


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Christopher Murtagh
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McGill University
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