3

I have a MacBook previously bootcamped to Windows 10. The internal hard drive had 3 partitions:

  • 200MB Partition 0
  • 249GB Partition 1 (OSX)
  • 250GB Partition 2 (Windows 10)

The model is a MacBook Pro mid-2012, and Partition 1 has OSX 10.15 Catalina.

I've made a fatal mistake of accidentally deleting the 200 MB partition via the Windows 10 install disk. I wanted to reinstall Windows 10 to fix some audio errors. Now I'm trying to recover all the files I have in the OSX partition. Before I made this mistake, I've backed up all Windows files on the OSX partition.

If I go to disk utility via Internet Recovery on my Mac, the list of disks and volumes has a "disk0s1" volume that I can't verify nor repair but can only be partitioned away. If I ever re-partition or reformat that hard drive, all data will be lost. I need to recover the files before I do anything.

diskutil list prints out:

/dev/disk0
#:                   TYPE NAME SIZE      IDENTIFIER
0: FDisk_partition_scheme      *500.1 GB disk0
1:                   0xFF      249.0 GB  disk0s1

gpt -r show /dev/disk0 prints out:

    start      size index contents
        0         1       MBR
        1         1       Pri GPT header
        2        32       Pri GPT table
       34         6       
       40    409600     1 GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B
   409640 486328128     1 MBR part 255
486737768       152       
486737920 490035200     3 GPT part - EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7
976773120        15       
976773135        32       Sec GPT Table
976773167         1       Sec GPT header

The tools I currently have for this situation:

  • Windows 10 installation USB
  • A Seagate External portable 1TB hard drive
Marko Ivanović
  • 51
  • 1
    How about a little more information to help narrow it down a bit? What year Mac? What version of macOS? Can I assume you booted to macOS Recovery to get the output you posted? It looks like you have not actually deleted any partitions. The problem appears to be the data in the partition tables is messed up. Might be usefull to see the output from fdisk /dev/disk0. – David Anderson Dec 05 '20 at 18:30
  • The model is a MacBook Pro mid-2012, and the OSX partition has 10.15 Catalina. Just added the output for fdisk /dev/disk0 in the post. – Marko Ivanović Dec 06 '20 at 21:03
  • 1
    @MarkoIvanović Please edit your question rather than commenting :) – X_841 Dec 06 '20 at 21:16

2 Answers2

0

I will post this as an answer although there are some uncertainties since some info is missing.

Deleting this does not at a all delete your actual Mac/Windows partition. Therefore, I doubt you have actual done too much harm.

It is not clear if you have tried and failed, but you should be able to boot into macOS. After startup go into the finder and show all drives (finder hit cmd, select sidebar and tick everything that says disk).

You should then be able to see the remaining two partitions, Macintosh HD and some other name (e.g. Windows). Usually, you can simply open either and then do whatever you want, e.g. clone one disk, save the data,...

X_841
  • 3,386
-1

Don't panic, It can probably be the EFI partition, a simple reinstall (without erasing anything) will do the job.

Nor, if you have another Mac/PC, you can boot your Macbook on which you want to recover files, in target disk mode (by pressing "D" at boot) and connect it on your other Mac/PC.

v64isgood_vitali64
  • 23
  • 3
    Do not reinstall without verifying that the original files are readable (and if they're readable, you shouldn't need to reinstall). If the installer can't recognize the old filesystem and its contents, it will write over them, destroying the old data in the process. – Gordon Davisson Dec 06 '20 at 21:20